This the problem with automated business processes. It seems easy, until you think about all the exception paths. Human organizations can adapt and handle them organically, but a system needs them all specified up front. Either you spend a massive amount of work to get it right or you have a broken system. And once you have it right, it's hard to change and adapt.
A technique I often use in this is to leave a "human in the loop". Have control points where the system takes no further action until an administrator requests it. Instead of coding that automated cleanup routine, send a notification to an admin and let them take care of it manually.
As the system matures and the edge cases become better understood it can become more automated. At first, though, leave it loose and human-powered wherever you can.
Yeah, in this case the automated system should have reminded his manager and their manager that his contract was up so that they could click a button and schedule his last day.
Keep the decision in the hands of a human but let the machine do the grunt work.
Or, you don't think about all the exception paths, and just add a mechanism for humans to override the system's decisions. Which clearly no one managed to do in a timely fashion in this case.
Not necessarily. If the employee is going through a body shop (and it sounds like he was, since he had a recruiter) then he might be an employee on W2 of the staffing agency, but not on the actual payroll of the company. That's different than forcing the person on a 1099 as part of an employment contract.
In the end he's still a "contractor" in the eyes of the company, and typically if something goes wrong, he's gonna be the first to go.
> Does a staffing agency pay as a W-2 employee and provide an insurance plan?
Not necessarily. Some will, but the coverage is usually not awesome. Then the question is, do you want the health insurance, or is it better to get obamacare because the staffing agency is likely going to be more temporary?
I'm becoming more an more of a believer that health insurance should be separate from employment. Mostly because your health is permanent and employment is most likely temporary.
To clarify, I find it incredulous that a 3 year contract requiring full-time, on-site, business hour presence wouldn't legally require a company to treat that person as a full-time employee with benefits.
They said they talked to "their recruiter" which usually means they are a full time employee of another organization which has a three year contract to place this person with this company.
I read it and still don't really understand why there was no one administrating the system. Who could have stopped the system (with the appropriate emails to cover their ass).
I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?
That’s what I was thinking. If you had a contract and your manager was saying you were supposed to be working… Why not sue for the three weeks of pay that they illegitimately kept you from earning?
Yeah. It’s what I was thinking throughout most of the article, assuming that the end would be “I lost my job and there was nothing I could do about it“. It’s not like it was a three day thing, I could sort of understand that.
Since they are a contractor, it also seems like perhaps the company that they are actually employed with should be paying them for the contract company’s screwup. That would also probably heavily incentivize the company they actually work for to put pressure on the contractee to fix the issue.
People like to joke about and deride America's litigious culture but the US doesn't have the same labor rights infrastructure as other countries... sometimes lawsuits are the only legal recourse a "typical American" has.
The system didn't need to be stopped. The employee's contract wasn't renewed, which is indistinguishable from a decision terminate him, so the system executed the termination as scheduled.
The system did exactly what it was intended to do, it was the humans who screwed up. Humans who presumably understood the way the system was designed, and didn't care enough to do some due diligence.
>I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?
He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions.
The real lesson here is that few of us, no matter how much money we make, how into the culture we are or how long our tenure has been, are more than a row in a database to our employer, and we can be dropped at any time. The contractor in this case would not have had much more "job security" with humans in the loop.
>He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions.
There's basically a certainty that it was a violation of his contract and company policies that made it not legally sound. A company can also pay whoever it wants for any reason.
"Contractor" in tech means, "we want you as an employee but we're too cheap to obey the laws involved or make a commitment, so here's a 3 year contract, hope this never goes to court!". Frankly, it's a way for companies to avoid the law, though California at least has recently made this an illegal sort of arrangement via new work rules.
IANAL either, but I did get a Bachelor of Law; one thing that was hard for me to get while I was studying is that while I thought of the law & contracts as a series of instructions that get executed by the "CPU" (our legal system), really for the most part it's being executed by humans who really dislike cute "this then that, screw context" thinking. I would not be surprised at all if a judge would laugh at an employer that tried to make the argument that he was "terminated" due to a clerical error and automated systems, therefore they don't need to pay him...
But, it depends! It's never black and white for this stuff. It'd be an interesting case though, and I'm sure it's happened before!
> I would not be surprised at all if a judge would laugh at an employer that tried to make the argument that he was "terminated" due to a clerical error and automated systems, therefore they don't need to pay him...
Yeah, judging from this thread and the negative scores on some of my comments, I was way off base about that.
> The system did exactly what it was intended to do, it was the humans who screwed up.
It was the humans who designed and who chose to deploy a system without a human in the loop, and without an override (even after a director was involved) that screwed up.
They screwed up, but that happens. The point where the system takes over and even the higher-ups can't override it is where the story becomes Kafka-esque.
If you build an automation system that goes out of human control after a human error, that is a failed design.
>If you build an automation system that goes out of human control after a human error, that is a failed design.
Unless it was designed with the intent that human intervention should be impossible once a process was started. That would make it a very poor design, but not a failed one.
I've seen lots of internal software that doesn't have failsafes or rollbacks - the operator is simply trained to follow procedure and then is expected to follow it. Software that considers operator error is more complex, and therefore more expensive, to produce. Cost often supersedes quality or flexibility when these systems are developed.
"Self-destruct sequence initiated, cannot abort." should be left in the world of sci-fi.
If there is a physical process that cannot be stopped (rocket, nuclear reactor, oil well) then of course the system must be designed around that physical fact.
But this is an HR process. The "moving parts" are people.
If it was designed with the intent that human intervention should be impossible, the design was a failure.
Perhaps more likely it was just a failure of implementation (there's a cancel button but nobody knows where) or of imagination (nobody thought about whether the process could be canceled or not).
What if instead of HR, this was a financial process, playing out over days or weeks, entirely beyond the company's control. Would any sane CFO approve such a thing?
> Cost often supersedes quality or flexibility
That helps to explain it, but it doesn't excuse it.
> He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions.
Somebody who is in your building, is doing work under your direction, and has not been told they are fired hasn't been fired. A judge in court for the lost wages would laugh you out of the room if you tried a "well but actually, the system..." argument in that situation.
I had a similar situation where it was proven that law is law while contracting at nab, a bank in Australia, years ago.
- When I first started, it took months to get me added to the project phase to bill my time.
- When I was finally added, I couldn't bill it because that project phase was over
- Then a few months to find a solution, then I was asked to bill to the new project phase
- I couldn't bill my old time to the new project phase as it wasn't running in the time I first started.
The bank kept promising they'd work out a way for me together compensated for the time. They continued to do this after I ended the contract.
I kept chasing them, and they went quiet. Then they said they weren't paying me for the time I worked because I hadn't entered my time correctly, then blamed me for walking out the door before I'd been paid the money they owed.
I called a lawyer. nab responded as above. The lawyer told nab that Australian law doesn't care about their billing system - mentioning the specific law helped.
They paid all the money a week later. I should have asked for costs and interest too, but oh well.
Constructive dismissal is treated as "you quit, but you quit because the conditions imposed on you were such that you had no choice, and we will treat that as the company firing you rather than you voluntarily choosing to quit".
I worked as a contractor for a couple of months at a company with 100k+ employees. And then got hired.
Once a year human resources would decide my 'contract' was up and order IT to terminate my network access and payroll to stop paying me. Had another lady got hired from contract around the same time. The day she started working they terminated her email account and it took them six weeks to restore it.
No! It happened in the middle of a contract which wasn't terminated. There's no two ways of looking at it. A wrong termination date entered somewhere doesn't change the contract.
> Paying people not in your employ is fraud, [...]
The person was still employed. If anything in this story was fraud, it was the company stopping payment based on a wrong termination date. They even knew the date was wrong and still didn't pay. Clear-cut case!
Of course, if the parties later agree that the contract was in fact canceled at that point, that's how it is. Because parties can agree to cancel a contract. What a sucker though in this case.
sounds like the machine worked perfectly. it did what it was supposed to do and followed the rules layed out by us humans.
the problem is in the way the workflow is described/implemented - and even with that we would need to see some numbers around how many times the workflow ran vs issues encountered.
sometimes there is a disconnect between the people that make the decision on the what vs people that implement it. Also, sometimes, what starts as a reasonable system evolves over time to a point where it's stupid hard to think of all the edge cases.
It's hard when it's a cobbled-together set of systems sending signals to each other, some of which are automated by human robots (e.g. main system sees exit, files a dozen tickets, some of these get picked up by different automation, some of them cause humans to trigger other processes, each of which can again file half a dozen tickets in three different systems...)
No, it's not. Make every step check the existence of a kill-swith entry in a shared resource, say, zookeeper, mysql, etc., before they act. If it's there, halt. A human than can do the manual cleanup.
Yes and no. You’re assuming all systems have a sane way of integrating. You’re also assuming that whoever build this has knowledge of all moving parts and has thought through all edge cases.
When you put in the killswitch, is this for a step, for a workflow, for a subsystem, for the whole thing? It’s alluring to think that you have the option to stop everything, but do you really want to stop everything if there are thousands of things happening in the system?
Can a human think through what happens to what in this situation? If the builders of the system missed it, what are the odds that an operator will catch it?
For example: gas stations. They have a big red button that stops everything. If a pump if on fire it makes sense. If the trash can near the pump is full and you cannot throw your garbage away would anyone stop everything for the can to be emptied?
My thoughts as well. I've spent the last decade+ working for sub-500 person companies, largely sub-100. I find myself now through acquisition in a 1,000 plus person company and I find it… stifling.
It's bizarre to me to work for a company where I don't know close to everyones name. This kind of junk never happens in small companies.
In a small company, you don't get the protection of the bureaucracy either. You're likely to know the CEO, but that means everything depends on their character and the culture they institute. And even if they are generally ethical, a small company CEO who does a good job probably sacrifices a lot and then feels entitled to sacrifices from employees. And if you can't deal with politics in a small company, you can't transfer to another division. There are lots of potential drawbacks of a small company, like a small town.
Talking to my friends who work for very large companies, at least in their cases it seems like it's often easier to get a new job at another small company than to get a transfer - for what it's worth.
I had a somewhat similar, but much less serious experience at Google. I resigned just after I had gotten a promotion, but before the date when the promo was effective. Much to my surprise, the resignation (slated to be effective after the promo) somehow cancelled the promo via some automated system.
However, a promo at Google is a huge deal. I really wanted the promotion to go through, so that I would have that level if I decided to re-join Google (or even so that go/epitaphs would match my resume). My manager and HRBP managed to get it sorted out, but it was a pain.
What made you think that you were entitled to something that you were supposed to receive on a date which was later than the date on which you resigned?
I resigned effective the 2nd of a month, and the promo was effective the 1st of the month. See above "resignation (slated to be effective after the promo)". So the resignation was scheduled for the day after the promo.
I actually stayed an extra week to receive the promo.
Why? Top performers are poached all the time. Plenty of people do excellent work in jobs they may not love. Both promotions and bonuses are usually tied to performance review cycles, and right after bonuses vest is the most popular time to leave.
I have an ex-colleague that was promoted 2 weeks after she resigned, just days before she left the country. The announcements came in the right order, first leaving the company and later being promoted. It puzzled lots of people, but this stuff happens.
It is entirely possible they weren't planning on getting promoted.
I was due for a performance review about a week before I handed my notice in at my old job. The review didn't happen because my boss was incapable of communicating with his employees and actually scheduling appointments with them, but had it happened, I was fully prepared to push for a payrise, even though it would only be a couple of dollars an hour, and for only 3 weeks.
You wouldn't turn down a promotion because you know you're about to hand your notice in. You act like everything is normal and you're going to be working at the company for the foreseeable future, right until the day you hand your notice in, which should be at the minimum notice period.
Otherwise what would happen if you decline a promotion, then your new job offer falls through? You'd be left looking like a prize dick.
I had a similar thing happen, except the company was acquired and we thought we were being laid off. 30 days after I started with my new employer, I received notice of being equated to a higher rank in the new company, and a very significant stock grant.
It's not that uncommon - promotion takes so long and has so many moving parts - you might as well interview somewhere else, since if it doesn't succeed you'll just be doing the whole thing again in six months.
except that this doesn't work in a high demand market such as the Bay area right now!
Your old manager may have said that to encourage you to stay, but at the end of the day he will promote whoever needs to be promoted in order for that person not to leave. It is all very simple offer and demand at the end of the day.
I was once in a company where the CEO liked to brag that in this company everyone is fairly paid in regards to their competences. You can guess what happened next, we went to have a couple beers with colleagues one evening and started talking about salaries. We realized that we had salaries that didn't really match what the CEO was pretending. The laws of the market are simply too strong, you will always need to sometime pay someone a lot because of circumstances or because that person had another offer to match.
At the end of the day, companies benefit a lot from information asymmetry (they know everyone's salary, but you know nothing). They can claim a lot of things without you having the ability to verify it.
The point here is not the raise, but the promotion itself. It's leverage for joining other large companies ("I was a Senior SWE at Google, so you'll need to offer me a Staff SWE role"), and as the OP notes, it lets them come back to the new level without having to go through the promo gauntlet again.
1) Employee gets promotion, effective in the future (at #3)
2) Employee resigns, to be effective after promotion (at #4)
3) Promotion is to be effective at this date
4) Resignation is to be effective at this date
In my understanding, the employee's resignation is to be effective after the promotion it to be effective, so that the they would resign with the new/promoted level.
Because large companies give the promos as trailing indicators of performance, meaning that to be promoted requires an acknowledgment of prior sustained performance at that level. Entitlement to the level is actually accurate and above board.
On the one hand, you have been promoted to a new role, so you have reached a compatible level of expertise. You can put that role on your resume and sell yourself.
On the other hand, you never, ever actually performed in that role, with the new responsibilities. How can you list that on your resume !
I am not sure what is the right answer here... but as your new employer I would take your last promotion with a big grain of salt. A resume is not a score sheet of levels accomplished in a game, it is a list of things your have actually done.
At least at Google, the whole point of a promo is that you've been working at the new level for some time before the promo cycle. And the new employer was not really in the equation, I'd already received my offer from them.
There is a very clear right answer here provided you consider promotion from a clean point of view.
A promotion is a _recognition_ that you are _already_ operating at a given level. It's an acknowledgement by TPTB that you deserve a given title.
Anything less than this leads to a result where you may not actually be performing at the level the new title requires, which means you could conceivably be promoted and immediately fail to meet expectations in the new role.
I'm not particularly familiar with the system at Google, but at any somewhat decent tech company in order to get a promotion you have to already perform as you would in your "future" role for some time, with higher-level expectations and responsibilities.
For example, is someone with level I is up for level II promo, she/he has to match level II criteria long before actual promotion is due.
In reality promotions mostly happen in organizations due to political lobbying with the powers.
Even in these 'decent' tech companies you will see some people getting rapidly promoted and moving up the hierarchy, while genuine performers are stuck in the process and minutiae. Its just what kind of leverage your manager has with the upper management.
I think everyone should at least experience once to what length a company can go in order to keep someone they really need that threatens to leave.
It happened once to me: in a 150k people company that had a well defined promotion model very similar to Google. I gave my resignation notice and suddenly all the HR pep talk was out of the roof. I gained two levels and was promoted to director level.I still left but felt stupid I didn't threaten to leave earlier.
It made me realize that there are two types of workers. The ones that will play fair game and believe the HR pep talk, as we just saw in the previous comments, and the ones that realize that the fastest way to go is to bypass this and play politics in order to fastrack it. It is another type of skill.
A big thing to note in these political systems. People tend to emphasize your interface to the systems as 'Company thinks X about you', 'Company values your work' etc.
Companies are not living systems and in general its just people making decisions.
I've been walked over many times now, but once, after all the work, I was nominated for an award the company's annual meet. My manager, his manager and all the way up assured me that based on what I had done the award was coming my way. I was even asked to prepare a small speech to give on the stage, they even asked for a photo to put up on slide deck with a small bio.
Two days before the meet, my manager and the director called me into a meeting room to tell me that I wouldn't be getting the award, and they didn't want it to be painful surprise to me during the meet. And they had tried everything they could.
Eventually my manager told me during lunch later that big time political lobbying had gone into this, and VP making decisions had no option as he would be cornered politically on other issues, if he didn't relent to demands of rewards from other corners.
Google or any other company. Performance has nothing to do with how you get paid/rewarded in any company.
Curious, do Google regularly give free stuff to their customers (advertisers) hoping that in a few months those customers will upgrade to a higher service?
> On the other hand, you never, ever actually performed in that role, with the new responsibilities.
For what it's worth - that's not necessarily true. Several places I have worked gave promotions in retrospect - after you have been performing the additional responsibilities for a while. It's sort of like a 'dry run' - they want to make sure you can do it before officially thrusting it on you.
You need to stand up, stretch, and look really carefully at the world at large and your place in it. Getting a promotion at Google isn't actually a big deal at all, man. You went from generating $2M and being paid $225k of it to generating $2M and being paid $250k, plus you get an extra word in your title
Generally in cases like these, they don't want to waste the promotion(the new position) and they give it to whoever is next in line and wants to stay longer.
A very logical thing to do. In big companies it takes time to build a case for a promotion(position). If you were not going to use it, it was always a good thing to give it to somebody else.
Plus asking somebody to sustain a position for somebody who was promoted and still wants to leave seems like bonkers even from the HR perspective.
Google do not have position quotas. At least they didn't have them when I worked there a few years ago.
So getting a promotion is not done by competing with others for the same slot, but by earning the merit from doing a great job.
I doubt all business management software is this inflexible (never heard anyone complain about SAP "taking over"). Anyone have any idea which software product/service this may have been?
No way to say without the author chiming in, but it sounds like a bespoke system consisting of totally unrelated modules (payroll, security, Jira) hooked up, badly, with in-house scripts. This is the case at a large number of companies.
As you say, all-in-one systems have their drawbacks, but usually at least can handle situations like this. But piles of shell scrips to make unrelated systems talk to each other often lack error handling and rollback.
“The Machine” used to be a metaphor for the mindless beaucracy of the State and the mindless profit seeking of Capital. They both operate algorithmically, although their “hardware” were still humans. Now we are cutting out the human entirely from The Machine, hooking control of the economy directly into trading algorithms, and the control of humans directly into automated bureaucracies.
I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No."
I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point.
What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch.
So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next day I actually get a phone call from one of their support staff.
He says my transaction was flagged as "suspicious" by the fraud prevention system. So I asked, okay... but now a Human has looked at it, can you manually approve the transaction? The answer was "No, I am not allowed to tell you why".
I was incredulous, so I asked "Wait... you acknowledge that I'm not a scammer or a terrorist (since my PP account still worked and does to this day), and the party I'm trying to purchase from is obviously not either since they're still accepting PP, but The Machine thinks there is something fishy about us two specifically and there is no way for someone to manually approve this transaction?"
And he said something to the tune of "Yes. I'm sorry, but there is nothing I or anyone at PP can do about it, and for security reasons we're unable to offer further details."
So yeah. This was just a minor nuisance for me, I purchased similar services elsewhere. But the whole thing was a real eye-opener. That was the day I realized that there is no pleading or reasoning with The Machine.
> I realized that there is no pleading or reasoning with The Machine.
Weapons of Math Destruction was one of the most eye opening books I read recently. It's all about how Machines when set up with self-reinforcing models can become a real big problem.
And how the fact nobody quite understands how The Machine makes decisions isn't helping either.
Examples of these abound, from the article to the Ethereum DAO "hack" and too often (just look a bit lower in the comment section) the response is "The Machine is working as it should." I feel like automation is great but don't forget that people are still people and someone should be able to lift the lid and fix things themselves.
My solution would be to not rely too much on these systems, but at the very least, at least include escape hatches and big red emergency buttons. Engineers do, why can't hackers do this?
That can be difficult if security features rely on humans not being able to subvert the process, I think. But for other processes, this should be the default!
Once we let the machines make the decisions, and rely on them to do a "better job" there will be cases like this where it's just cheaper and easier to just follow the program and explain what happened.
Actually we are building a zoo for ourselves where humans will make no decisions at all about anything of consequence!
I'm incredibly sad at how much of my programming goes into monitoring the performance of my coworkers. The worst part is when I write a new tool and take a look at it before management does. Usually only 1 or 2 people are doing the tasks that management is asking everyone to do daily.
My former boss was once a programmer. Then he became a manager, so he wrote tools to help monitor his department. That went well for years. Then another manager was brought in to "help" him, and months later he was fired. I guess it was kind of obvious, but it still made an impression on me how cold blooded it was.
The metrics* gathered on us were pretty meaningless, and didn't meet the cardinal rule of being actionable, but we still had to go over them each and every week. And some of the actual work was producing reports on productivity for other parts of the company in different places.
*Despite the fact we were programmers and every person in the department had a different role, we were scored based on tickets done and tickets that failed qa.
Remember when the United Airlines system flagged specific passengers for removal? Throughout every step of the process employees were blocked or discouraged from exercising common sense to come up with a creative solution and bargain with passengers.
I've heard nothing but bad things about PayPal and how they often hold your own money hostage. Why don't people switch to alternatives? Are there no good ones?
As I understand it, expensive processes required for compliance with financial system/anti-money laundering laws make a moat for most money transmitting businesses. That moat prevents upstarts from challenging incumbents effectively.
Presumably someday cryptocurrencies will be able to fill the PayPal niche, but that requires a more robust buyer-merchant ecosystem than exists at present.
Taking money from paypal is a risk, as there's a period of time it's in paypal before you extract it
Sending money to a store on paypal doesn't seem to be a problem
For what it's worth, I've never had a bad experience with PayPal. I've heard all the horror stories, but nothing has come close to that. I sold something on Ebay once and the buyer didn't receive the item, and did what he should and reported it to Ebay/PayPal. Paypal started the dispute resolution process, and I uploaded a receipt of me sending it. The dispute was resolved in my favour.
I started accepting donations from a community gaming website via PayPal and I was very hesitant about using it due to the bad stories I've heard. A couple of months and a couple of hundreds of dollars later, no problems yet.
The biggest 'problem' I've had with PayPal is moving to a new country. You can't add International cards to your account, and you can't change the country of your PayPal account. The only solution for me was to create a new account, which is fine I guess.
But then I guess you never have a bad experience until you do.
> I sold something on Ebay once and the buyer didn't receive the item, and did what he should and reported it to Ebay/PayPal. Paypal started the dispute resolution process, and I uploaded a receipt of me sending it. The dispute was resolved in my favour.
How is that not a bad experience for a buyer who never got an item he paid for?
This is an insufficient explanation. When I pay you money I expect to get something in return. I have zero insight into who dropped the ball nor do I care. Your obligation wasn't to drop something at the mail it was to provide the customer with product whether this involves a rocket ship, fedex, or literal magic.
Every real merchant who deals with the public at scale accepts this and refunds in such cases. Presumably they eat the cost or THEY purchase insurance for the shipping and roll this into the cost so they don't have to tell customers I'm spending YOUR money on drugs and hookers and don't care if you actually got anything for it.
Such interactions absolutely destroy relationships with customers and the customers bank is likely to issue a charge back to protect their relationship with their customers.
For me, it depends on the context. In a B2B transaction, my basic assumption is that the vendor will ensure that the goods are delivered, and will make things right if they fail.
In my personal life on the other hand, I'm regularly prompted at checkout to decide between registered post with insurance, or regular post without. If I opted out of insurance, I wouldn't blame the seller for the package not arriving or any damage (presuming of course that it was packaged appropriately), and I'd fully expect Paypal to resolve in their favour after verifying that the package was actually sent.
It's true that this would ruin the customer relationship which is why some businesses may offer to make things right anyway, but I personally wouldn't expect it.
That said, the consumer protection laws in my country (Australia) are fairly strong so I may well be entitled to redress; this is just my personal attitude.
Depends on the country. In central europe the seller is responsible until the package arrives at the buyer (for private transactions, not business) so in this case Paypal would resolve in favor of the buyer and you'd have to get the money from the package service.
It might be a bad experience for the buyer (I'm not sure - I guess maybe PayPal still reimbursed them? idk?), but I did my part. It's not on me to lose money when I did everything I could.
The buyer kept emailing me after it, 'updating' me on the situation, which I mostly ignored. I believe he was in some smaller town and he knew the postman and had a very strong suspicion that he stole it, or something like that.
We had a problem where after about 10 years, PayPal suddenly decided that our account was in the wrong country, and the only solution was to close it. Kafkaesque.
The problem is that securily sending someone's money to someone else while avoiding fraud is hard. So you have a service that is difficult and expensive (for the merchant typically), or you have one that sucks for some users but good enough for most.
Bitcoin supports multisig transactions, which allows a buyer and seller to choose a third-party mediator who can side with one of them in the event of a dispute. If you find that all the counterparty risk in your transactions are placed on the buyer this is a problem with your use of Bitcoin, not Bitcoin itself.
We already have this mediator in the fiat world, though. It's called PayPal, or the bank that issued my VISA, or whomever else sits in between the merchant and myself. It also takes a ~2-3% cut for this service, and returns ~1% to me in cashback.
Why will this be any cheaper, or safer, or fairer with Bitcoin? All the incentives in this business align with the buyer. 90% of the time, I have a choice between many equivalent merchants, all of whom want my business. I will go with the one that supports my cash-back credit card - whose issuer will almost always side with me in a dispute.
Once these escrow services become popular in the crypto world, you're back to square one. The reasons for why PayPal sucks for some of its users have nothing to do with fiat money, and everything to do with the nature of the escrow business. It would be just as shitty for said users if it transacted in Bitcoin, Dogecoin, or silver bullion.
We already have third party mediators; paypal and visa.
The mediator can decide against your case just like Paypal or Visa can. Even worse, now I have to find some random mediator the seller trusts.
How is that better than plain bank transactions or paypal? The fees are not even cheaper for that "privilege" of having some random mediator play paypal-on-the-blockchain.
The reason sellers don't go elsewhere is that buyers really like it, because it gives buyers a lot of power.
I've had them be annoying to me before. My favorite PP fact I found out the hard way: never put the string 'aleph' in the note field. Apparently that's flagged as a Terror-Word(tm), and it held up a transaction of mine for over a month.
I still use them, but only under modified-casino rules: never play with money you can't lose. Have a separate bank account just for them, so they can't get up to shenanigans with more than you intend; never depend on them for anything time sensitive; and never send money anyone depends on for anything important.
Never hold a PP balance. If you receive money into your PP account, treat it as unavailable unless you successfully spend it on goods or services.
Never link your PP account to a bank account.
Only fund your PP account with a credit card, so you have some protection when things go wrong.
If you accept PayPal as a merchant, every dollar you have received is 100% at risk until you have a) received it in your bank account, and b) removed it from any account for which PayPal has the information necessary to perform ACH withdrawals. For merchants, PayPal is a nightmare.
As far as alternatives, customers seem to love PayPal, because they side with buyers effectively 100% of the time in any disputes. So even if there were a convenient PayPal clone (which there isn't, at least in the US), you still wouldn't match the conversion rate that PayPal has, as many people will only use PayPal.
So, you can either accept a lower conversion rate by going with something like Stripe (because users don't want to enter their CC information directly on small merchant sites), or you can accept PayPal and be essentially guaranteed that at some point your account will be closed and you'll be screwed out of a significant amount of revenue. Currently, these are the bad choices that merchants face.
There are exceptions to every rule, but in the vast majority of cases, they side with buyers. I once had someone that admitted in email that they were trying to extort me into refunding them. PayPal actually wrote back saying they were going to go to bat for me with the card issuer after I showed them these emails, but the card issuer didn't budge. I have no idea if PayPal sent the card issuer the emails, I just know that I wound up being out the money.
So you aren't just fighting with PayPal, you're fighting with card issuers as well. PayPal will side with buyers in most cases, and in the few instances where it is obvious that the merchant is correct and PayPal tries to do the right thing, then the card issuer will pick it up and screw the merchant from their side of it.
Regardless of who does the screwing, the merchant is the one that suffers in the end by accepting PayPal.
Companies have been using PayPal for over a decade without their accounts being closed.
Very large companies have nothing to worry about from PayPal, but small merchants have a very high percentage chance of being screwed by them. See http://www.paypalsucks.com/
Suppose I sell things on my website, and you visit it and buy something. You pay with a credit card. Maybe I accept credit cards directly and you pay that way, or maybe I accept PayPal and you pay me that way, and pay PayPal with a credit card.
Now suppose it turns out I have misrepresented the items I sell. When your item arrives, you find that my site was pretty much fraud. You try to contact me to demand a refund...but no one answers the phone or responds to email. That's because I took all the money from you and the rest of the people I deceived and moved far away, to someplace safe from extradition to the US and that won't enforce US civil judgments.
So you call up your credit card company, tell them what happened, and they quickly refund your money. As do the credit card companies of all the other people I took advantage of.
Where does the credit card company get the money for all those refunds? They aren't going to get it from me. They certainly have no interest in eating those losses themselves.
What they do is require a business that accepts credit cards to have an account at a "merchant bank". When someone pays that business by credit card, the credit card company does not pay the business directly. They pay the merchant bank, which pays the business.
In order to be allowed to do this, the merchant bank has to enter into a contract with the credit card company that says that the merchant bank will pay the credit card company for all refunds and chargebacks. The merchant bank will try to get the refund money from the business, but if they fail they have to make up the difference.
The way merchant banks do this is they hold back some of the money they receive from the credit card company for the business, to build up a buffer to cover refunds and chargebacks. As the business establishes a track record and the merchant bank becomes more confident in its estimates of the refund/chargeback risk for the business, they will adjust the amount they hold in reserve.
I don't know exactly how it works when a buyer uses a credit card to pay PayPal, but somewhere between the credit card company and the seller there is an entity taking the role of the merchant bank and guaranteeing that the credit card company won't be left holding the bag if the seller can't cover refunds/chargebacks.
I suspect that the entity is PayPal itself, and most of the incidents you hear about of them holding some seller's money is them increasing the reserve because there was some change in his selling pattern that suggested the current reserve was no longer in line with their estimates of his refund/chargeback risk.
I think people don't switch to alternatives because the alternatives, at least the ones that provide strong consumer protection, almost all have the same or similar mechanisms to try to make sure that if the seller is bad it is the seller who pays.
They could switch to alternatives that do pay the seller directly with no mechanism for a refund other than asking the seller, such as most cryptocurrencies, but then they would probably lose a lot of buyers unless they were very well established businesses with outstanding reputations. (But if that were the case, then they probably could accept credit cards without their merchant bank requiring a large reserve).
> and for security reasons we're unable to offer further details
To give a little behind-the-scenes here, I worked for a bit for a web hosting company that had this as standard policy. This was because, before it was put in place, scammers would actually use coordinated campaigns of support calls with otherwise legitimate accounts in order to extract piecemeal details about how the company's fraud investigations worked, then reorganize their scamming to precisely evade the time periods and credit card checks used at the time.
This was how Simplii and BMO (two Canadian banks) were hacked earlier this year.
> The hackers explained that they were able to breach the banks’ sub-par security by using an algorithm to generate account numbers and then posing as customers who had forgotten their passwords.
“They were giving too much permission to half-authenticated account which enabled us to grab all these information,” the email said, adding that the system “was not checking if a password was valid until the security question were input correctly.”
At my company, there was a specially-trained fraud department that could handle cases like that, with specially arranged hoop-jumping to prevent social engineering for information. I would expect that Paypal has something similar, but maybe the phone drone in that case was too untrained or unmotivated to transfer things to them.
Financial fraud prevention gambits are complicated.
It may be possible that PP thought someone else was using your account.
What should happen in these scenarios is simply a validation of some kind ie payment only goes through if you click on the email your received.
I used to travel to SF from Canada a lot and my bank would block my Visa even though I told them not to.
In the US there's no password in Visas, i.e. no chip-and-pin, which is totally crazy = huge fraud.
It's funny to think in the Silicon Valley, top tech companies in the world ... everyone is still using that old mag stripe stuff when pretty much the rest of the world has moved on.
The US largely migrated to chip and signature in 2015. I think a large majority of credit card uses today are chip in the US because the issuers quickly sent out chip cards, most terminals got updated to use them, and swipe is rejected often if chip is available.
To be clear, this is chip (and sometimes signature for large purchases) but not chip-and-pin, so the original statement of no passwords generally holds true, but the mag stripes are generally not used anymore.
This even works in chip-and-pin systems, at least here in Australia. Makes me sad, I don't really understand why falling back to what we're trying to replace is considered a good idea :(
The retailer either accepts swipes or not, ditto for your bank, the fact that there is a fall back feature if chip fails isn't a security failure unless it opens up a new avenue. (Someone could just print a magic strip unless one or both blocked mag strip charges)
At some retailers lights will flash around both the swipe slot and the chip slot on the machine when it is time to pay, but I’ve experimented with swiping a chip-enabled card and every time the machine immediately says ‘Insert Chip’. I think retailers still really want to accept swipes to prevent chip reliability issues from resulting in lost sales, but they also want to heavily prefer chip transactions because then they aren’t as liable in fraud cases. So perhaps they’ve bought credit card machines that have conditional-swipe failover for this.
It is about processing fees IIRC. No way to avoid the fraud liability but you can get a lower cost per transaction by having chip and being certified to take payments through it (including some extra auditing)
Given how craptacular the terminals are here, not having the fallback would lead to a nontrivial amount of lost sales. (Sooo.. I can’t pay? Guess I have to abandon this cart of groceries and find a bank branch...)
The chips also don’t seem to last as long as the magstripes for some reason (which makes zero sense when you think about it). I’ve had to get my card replaced 3x in the space of two years.
In actual practice TONS of people ruin their chips or regularly run them while doing stupid things like holding onto the card and bending it slightly or pulling it out early. When it fails to go through because they couldn't follow directions or because its outright broken they keep using their cards for months or until they get a new one expecting the retailer to deal with their half broken credit instrument and complaining energetically if it doesn't work.
Since a relatively small number of complaints ruins the parent companies perception of how well the individual store is doing as far as customer service the store level doesn't want anything to inconvenience their customers especially since literally 99.9999% of swipes are from legit customers not thieves.
There are still idiot retailers that won't support the chip for debit transactions. Or even stupider, some let you choose between credit or a debit after inserting to the chip reader and reject you for choosing debit.
Mag strips are often used by ATMs and machines that you stuff cards into for tickets (train, museum etc).m I don’t know why but I’ve never encountered an ATM that uses the chip. I’m an MRI radiographer with expertise in the area of mag strip erasure. Chips are fine though and work after repeated exposure to 3T magnets.
I’ve inferred that the newer ATMs I’ve encountered use chips: the card stays in the machine for the entire transaction and is released to you right before the cash is dispensed.
I don't think I've ever used an ATM that doesn't do this since I started using them some time in the late 90's, even when the cards had magstripe and the chip was a twinkle in a beach's eye.
Pbh101 and eythian - where in the world are you? I’m in New Zealand usually and France currently and I’ll pay attention in the U.K. next week. I’d love the strip to be redundant.
From NZ, now in NL. In both places, the card is virtually always ingested into the machine, and only released as the second-last step (before you get the cash.)
I tried to delink my bank account from PayPal, so I could close it, and it refused cos I apparently owed $1.27 even tho my balance said $0. I tried to add a credit card but it was flagged as suspicious. Contacting PayPal they said I needed to go into the bank and put some money, my account so PayPal could take it. But I had already closed the bank account.
After PayPal refusing to help. I resolved it by opening a new PayPal account. Adding my credit card (not flagged suspicious) and transfer $2 to the account. Then I could delink the bank account and close it. Then I closed the new account I opened.
I never knew I had a negative balance. Until after 2 years of it using PayPal they sent me a random email to inform me I had 30 days before they would pass it to debt collectors. So I figured better to close the account. Never use PayPal anyway.
I donno. This is PayPal Australia, maybe they operate differently. I couldn’t even figure out how my account got into a negative balance to begin with.
Unfortunately I don’t have any of the old emails otherwise I would upload it.
I purchased the board game "Cuba" from someone on gumtree (we're both Australian) and paid them with Paypal. For the transaction note I wrote "Cuba" and my (Australian) address.
This is what I received from Paypal:
To ensure that activity and transactions comply with current regulations, PayPal is requesting that you provide the following information via email to ComplianceTransactions@paypal.com
1. Purpose of payment XXXXXXXXXXXX attempted on 29 May 2016 in the amount of 53.00 AUD, including a complete and detailed explanation of the goods or services you intended to purchase. Please also explain the transaction message: "Cuba and postage to 4113. <my address>."
They obviously have a block on the word "Cuba" and there was some back and forth to let the transaction through.
I had a related experience wherein I asked Paypal for a debit card. They denied my request and locked my account (with money in it) until I provided a multitude of documents to verify my identity and ownership of my bank account.
Of course, they could provide no information about why this happened or how to avoid it. I became a lot more conservative about using Paypal again, and never did make another request for a debit card.
I make and upload electronic music to SoundCloud. Once I sent a joke DM to my friend, another SoundCloud user, mimicking a typical spam post at the time. SoundCloud's spam filtration system autobanned and deleted my account. I had it back a couple days later but a bunch of stuff is still off with my account(fewer plays, likes, followers, etc).
As my understanding was that the auto-reboot and lockdown of the systems supported by this engineer were the cause of this, the attacker scenario yields to Hanlon's razor here.
The article describes that his former manager was terminated due to a corporate acquisition, and turned into a contract-worker from home "until after the takeover" and that manager never updated the HR system to show the article writer's contract was renewed. So, from the system's perspective, he was to be terminated on 3/1/17, and the system hadn't been told that was no longer true and so it performed it's programmed activities.
I was misatakenly caught in an automated ban wave in World of Warcraft for "botting" just a couple months after joining, but as soon as a human reviewed my account I was reinstated immediately.
The automated system flagged my account a second time a few weeks later, and when I appealed they simply said that although they didn't see any evidence of rule-breaking behavior, nobody got caught by the automated system twice unless they were cheating.
I was out over $100, and I didn't even get six months to play the game. Sometimes The Machine just "knows best".
Simple explanation: they did in fact see what you were doing and just didn't want to tell you because they don't want to teach cheaters how to evade bans. They were hoping after the first review that you would start playing by the rules.
Even simpler explanation is that false positives are real. All sufficiently complex systems have them. I'd imagine that triggering a false positive the first time greatly increases the likelihood that a second false positive is triggered.
I'd also further assert, that simply being an HN reader means you are more likely to trigger a false positive than the rest of the population. Blizzard does some very aggressive memory scans, and they look for tools that are much more common with developers than the rest of the population. I've personally used a well known library for code injection, that if I'd had it running on an unrelated binary while playing WoW they would have seen the signature of the library, and likely Blizzard would have eventually banned my account.
I don't know if the parent was doing things that Blizzard considers naughty or not, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt given what I've read about Blizzard's Warden.
As someone who hasn't played computer games much since the 90s, I read comments like this and am just boggled by how seriously everyone takes games these days, the players, and the vendors, and the general public. It's as if you had to get a security clearance to use a wiffle ball and bat.
It only takes 1 person to ruin the experience for hundreds, or thousands, of others in online games. Given each of those people is a source of recurring revenue to Blizzard-Activision, the actions taken against cheaters is understandable.
This. I got a false positive on Runescape about 4 years ago, they won't even let you appeal because it was a serious offence. Lost my best account, and they cancelled my membership. Never paid for the game again after that, on my new account.
Well I wasn't cheating in any way, just using the auction house/trade chat much more than a typical new account because most of my MMO experience was in EVE online and I like the "economic PVP" of cornering markets and flipping for a profit.
Some cursory research told me that new accounts with a lot of market activity were a "red flag" for the automated system due to similarity with bots that created new accounts to evade bans, which I guess makes sense. Of course this is the internet and you have no particular reason to believe I was or wasn't cheating on World of Warcraft, but for what it's worth this HN account is linked to my real identity and if I were cheating all the time I would know better than to brag about it or even obliquely reference it in my posting here.
So, based on past experience and the experiences of others - that is bannable behavior to them. They don't want people playing the AH on items - they certainly don't want people cornering a market - they just want a simple method for people to trade goods for gold.
Yours is simply the latest in a line of those who have followed the letter of their Auction House rules, but not the nebulous and unwritten "spirit".
The really surprising part is that after this incident OP still wanted to work with that company, even though from what I understand they didn't make it up to him in any way.
Yeah that seems insane to me. Sure maybe you go back since it doesn't seem to be malice on the part of the employer, but to not get compensation for the time you were "fired"...
He returned to the company but jumped ship at the next opportunity, which makes sense assuming that there's going to be some lag time on opportunities - particularly since he'd just missed 3 weeks of pay and presumably wanted to keep a paycheck while he was looking.
I have a story in a similar vein, although a much less scary one.
In that instance, The Machine Cleaned Out My Desk.
I had a cubicle at the company HQ, but was for some period of time working from home in another state. I still kept quite a few things in the cubicle (notebooks, mugs, etc), which I used when I was in the area.
When I finally came back, I noticed, after a month or two, that my office number has not been updated in the system (from being "HOME OFFICE"), and sent a request to IT to change it.
The next day I came back to see a pristine desk.
With all my stuff gone.
See, my request to update the office number triggered a relocation request. The system, in preparation of the move-in of the "new" tenant (me) into my cubicle, has removed all the belongings of the previous tenant (which also happened to be me).
Luckily, all the removed stuff was put in a box, which I got back several days later, after my manager found the right person in the facilities dept.
Just goes to show that automating even the simplest procedures can be very tricky - and that perhaps it's best to have people on-site manually approve any destructive steps.
The next day I came back to see a pristine desk.
With all my stuff gone.
Something like this happened to me too at a previous employer, some things I recovered but many were just gone, the cleaning staff apparently help themselves to stuff that “former” employees leave behind, so my fancy headphones for example were just gone. Fucks given by HR/facilities? Zero. One of many similar incidents for me and my cow-orkers. And this was a desk move literally from one row to another!
It wasn’t even an algorithm per se, most of the “machine” at this place was people in India following checklists manually. You could speak to them (tho' they made this very difficult to do) and tell them to stop and they would say “yes” and do it anyway.
I had a friend at another company who was mistakenly terminated, a week later his manager called him at home to find out if he was OK, the conversation apparently went,
I am normally big on Solidarity with fellow Workers but the humans in this loop really should be automated away, because they knew what they were doing was a mistake and did it anyway, so what value were they adding? In fact they were worse than automation because at least that can be debugged, but there is no fix for the bureaucratic mindset.
Especially since you could tell them to stop and they would say "yes" and then carry on anyway...
Another story from the same company, group A would enter their requirements into system 1, group B would pick up work tickets from system 2. Group A thought that group B were idiots who could never do anything right, and group B thought that group A were idiots who could never make up their minds what they wanted.
But the real problem was group C who maintained systems 1 and 2 and "integrated" them with people in India manually rekeying from one to the other with frequent typos. They thought they were saving money but never considered the cost of delays and re-work in groups A and B...
>you could tell them to stop and they would say "yes" and then carry on anyway... //
This was discussed/commented on at length a couple of weeks ago. In Indian culture, apparently, the "yes" is like a verbal tick - kinda - and just acknowledges you've spoken without giving any commitment to doing anything (nor indeed indicating any level of understanding).
Not exactly. If you ask "do you understand ?" and "will you do it?" they will tell you yes as well. It's not a verbal tick. It's just not socially acceptable to say no.
Tons of people have this exchange out of politeness. The person asking “How are you?” doesn’t really want to know details. The person answering is expected to be brief and positive. It’s only among friends that the same question is expected to get an honest and detailed answer.
As a Finn I typically answer what I really feel at that moment. It creates funny situations, but in general I think if you ask me a question I should give a truthful answer. Why would you ask if you don't want to know...
I tried this and it worked poorly; people tended to get annoyed at me for answering the stupid question that they asked. Now I just go with "not too bad" in various tones of voice.
I escalated it to building security, where I had some mates, and they reviewed what CCTV evidence there was but couldn't find anything.
I don't even really blame the cleaners; people left expensive electronics, phones, wallets, whatever on their desks all the time, never any issues at all, I don't think any of them would have taken anything that wasn't from the pile, it was probably at least tacitly sanctioned by their management (who probably helped themselves first too).
Yeah, I think that's the difference. They won't touch anything that's clearly for someone else. But in their mind, the previous tenant had abandoned that stuff. It was free real estate. They didn't think it was stealing because they didn't think it belonged to anyone.
> automating even the simplest procedures can be very tricky
automating business processes is actually a similar activity to doing programming!
When it's done competently, the business runs smoother. But if there are bugs (and as anyone who programs knows, there are always bugs), things go wrong. And yet, people who know not anything about complex systems design attempt to write up business requirements for such automation are numourus.
> perhaps it's best to have people on-site manually approve any destructive steps.
Or, almost certainly cheaper, manually deal with the 1 in 10,000 case like yours.
In this case, a simple notes field in the request system would perhaps have sufficed. Perhaps there is/was, and it wasn't filled out because it wasn't recognized as being some manner of exceptional request. Perhaps if there was manual approval, removal of your stuff would still have been approved.
It's literally impossible to catch all of these, because human error will creep in. Sounds to me like your case was dealt with adequately. (Perhaps not from your personal perspective!!)
If my research notebooks actually ended up in the trash, the loss of productivity would have certainly not been cheaper compared to implementing a simple checkmark requiring the approval of the manager of the person whose desk was cleaned out.
Or, stop letting the people with business degrees effectively write software via SAP. They're not trained for it, and they don't know how to think through edge cases or reduce fragile entanglements across areas of concern.
Idea: Require every action taken by an SAP or similar system be tagged with the name and telephone number of the MBA who created the action in SAP.
> I missed 3 weeks of pay because no one could stop the machine.
Why has this company not made their loyal worker whole? He stayed there when they needed him even when their system was trying to lock him out.
They need to fix this. If they don't, they are not a company anyone should work for. Perhaps the worker did not want to risk making a big stink, but a manager should have taken the initiative. Humans were involved by the end and well aware of what was going on.
Sounds like he's contracting at a huge company. His contracting company isn't going to make waves over this. I would guess the contracting company is making $300+ an hour off this guy, paying him $50 an hour, and they have 200+ other contractors in the building.
But nobody will. This is a common story in contractor arrangements---the big, unwritten benefit of the process is that all incentives are aligned to sweep small mistakes (1) under the rug. Contracting client doesn't want to jeopardize a good contract, contractee doesn't want to jeopardize their contract, and employee doesn't want to get fired and black-balled. Who cares if it's a little illegal? :(
(1) "Small" in relation to the whole contract deal; what's one employee's salary in a million-dollar agreement between two corporations?
Real story from one of the (big) french telecom companies I worked for, as a contractor (a few years ago)...
In that company, a regular employee was given a full desk, contractors were only given 2/3 of a desk (meaning 2 desks put side by side for 3 persons).
Also, contractors were NOT allowed to go to ANY conference. Even when it was about technical stuff that was directly for their project. We had to rely 100% on a transmission of information by our managers/team leads. This led to humorous results, to say the least.
Things like: a BIG meeting with plenty of people and managers, who then decided a HUGE technical change on the network, without the ONLY expert because he happened to be a contractor. Once given the results of the meeting, the guy was in a "WTF?" shock. He told me that be immediately binned the request: it basically asked him to disable the authentication server! Not the best decision for a BIG ISP, LOL. Seriously, that's almost beyond belief. (But I have other incredible stories similar to this one).
As a contractor, I have really been mistreated A LOT. So much so that I've sworn never to do it again.
I'm a contractor in France, the treatment depends on where one is working. Canal+ and PSA were bad, but the current situation is good, there's no difference between myself and the employees.
Sounds like departments were using contractors as full members of staff. Contractors should be brought in for a specific purpose, as a consultant to staff, as an extra pair of hands to follow the whims of staff.
If contractors are the only expert in a domain, there are big problems. Of course in corporations this is quite frequent - middle managers have yearly budgets for contractors, but aren't allowed to use that money to increase their headcount.
A company I work for decided to get a contractor in to run a £40m project. This makes sense for a management perspective, they get to blame the contractor (who's already left) if it fails, and they get to claim the glory if it works. It's terrible for a company though.
If I want 500 cables run in a data centre, or even 5 cables if it's a long way, I'll get a contractor in. Saves me a day by not having to do that work neatly and lets me do more important things (like ranting on HN). If I want someone to build me a fancy gui, I'll specify the frameworks, and let them mess around with the look and feel, but ultimately I own the output of the work, I need to be able to deal with it as if I wrote it myself.
I don't really know if there's wage theft going on. I suppose the client company got some free work out of him, but the company can argue he shouldn't have been in the building. His badge didn't work, etc. But maybe the will let him bill those hours retroactively.
If he's working for a contracting company, why would he lose wages? Wouldn't he still have a contract with that company? I work for a contracting company (in the EU), and if the client lets me go, I still get paid until a new project can be found.
Their account got cancelled because the contract did not get renewed. Sounds like the company fulfilled the terms of the original contract, just (accidentally) didn't renew it. Many long term contracts require periodic renewals and/or options.
>Some of that work included renewing my contract in the new system... When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me.
Perhaps he should've written it as an "adding" instead of "renewing" since it's an existing contract with the merged company that needed to be properly added to the take over company.
With contract staff, the duration is usually a not to exceed. Also, it’s typically a contract to deliver a person with specific skill, not a specific person.
There are exceptions, but they are pretty rare in tech.
As I read the piece, it was a three year contract which was included in the old HR system, but not ported to the new one. If that's true, it was certainly breach of contract - "we forgot to upload the paperwork" doesn't get you out of honoring it.
It's not weird - the vast majority of long term contracts I've seen (for services my company provides) are several years long but requires the other party to renew the contract at periodic intervals.
So the contract was negotiated at a specific price point for (say) three years but every X months the other party can opt out by not renewing. They only commit for a certain term.
As I interpreted the piece, it was a three year contract which was stored in an old system, and not transferred when that system was replaced. So the firing was triggered by the system no longer seeing any valid contract.
If that's true, it would be breach of contract. But if it was a rolling contract expected to end after three years, then yes, it would be a weird situation but not a breach.
How do you think you will enforce that contract? Hire a lawyer? You might as well go to the ATM grab as much cash as you possible. Then put it all in a garbage can and light a match. It will be far less costly and more productive then attempting pursue that contract.
Sue in small claims court for week 1. Win. Obtain judgment.
File lien against company assets. Sue in small claims court for week 2. Win. Obtain judgment. File lien against company assets. Repeat as necessary. Offer settlement in return for not suing anymore.
Is this just wishful thinking that, if something went wrong with your paycheck, the world would be just and there would be an easy legal remedy waiting for you?
From what I understand, you can only sue for $1000 or less in small claims court. An IT contractor who is making $1000 or less per week has bigger problems.
I have good news for you: the small claims limit varies by state and, according to data from this website[1], the average upper limit is $8K (median is $6K, with the lowest being $2.5K).
In reality it would be: spend court fees..sue in small claims court. Win. Good luck collecting in many cases. Filing for a lien? Good luck with that pointless venture...
Once you have a judgement, you contact the Sheriff to help you collect. With a judgement, you are able to take things from them in order to make your judgement. Usually once that actually starts happening, the company will cut you a check pretty quick.
In most states, the fee to file in small claims is somewhere between $30-$100. Filing for a lien with the local sheriff is another $100 or so. Well worth it for 3 weeks wages.
Or has been done in the UK send bailiffs to the company head office :-)
Of course you'd shop around for the Bailiff company with the worse reputation and get them to send the lads who moonlight at that dodgy night club as Bouncers.
I don't know, does US not have a small claims court? In UK you'd pay £90 to file a case, you'd get a judgement in about a week and the company would be ordered to pay. Like I really don't understand this entire issue. Did he even ask HR to be compensated for this time? I feel like the whole article is missing some crucial information.
Yes, the US has small claims courts. They are run at the state/county level, so fees and maximum recovery values vary. Fees generally run $30-$100 and max. recovery somewhere around $5k. After winning a case, filing a lien with the sheriff is another $100 or so.
I agree. It's a theme I run across in many US-worker situations we read about on HN. There is such a lack of basic rights, but also basic norms when relating to workers.
Ethical behaviour, from my perspective, would be to compensate the employee, regardsless of his legal rights. In a more worker-central system, the worker should have easy recourse to an official judgement for his money.
In the Netherlands there is even a concept of culpability in laws regarding firing. Mess up too much, and the employer will have to pay a premium on the disengagement fee. And while our economy is moving towards a lot more 'sole employee contractors' with less worker-rights, you still have rights and a way to affordably enforce them. For them (only) basic contract law holds. That would probably mean paying the full 3 years in this context. A contract _is_ a contract.
None of what you says really applies in this case. According to the article the thing that triggered this was the failure to renew his contract.
If it had renewal intervals, that means he wasn't legally entitled to 3 years.
This is likely why he wasn't paid for the interim either. The best the company could do would likely be to bump up the future rate or offer a "signing bonus".
Being a contractor is not at all like being an employee despite how similar the responsibilities are. You have to watch contract details like renewals like a hawk. This guy and his recruiter should have included compensation for failing to notify when not renewing.
It does though, failure to renew a contract should be announced in writing a month in advance to allow the employee to search for a new job and take holidays that may be left. If the announcement is late, the employee is entitled to an extra months' pay.
I doubt that's correct legal analysis. This worker is not an employee of the company, and so cannot assert rights afforded employees. There might exist special termination provisions in the contract, but that's speculation.
While I agree with the letter of your legal analysis, it should not be "the best the company could do" to make the worker whole. It ought to be expected that both parties behave ethically.
The worker should not abandon the company during their time of need because of an unfortunate legal SNAFU. The company, in turn, should take it upon themselves to ensure that the worker doesn't suffer economically for having done the right thing by them.
Why wouldn't a contractor leave the company when the company has done everything in its power to show the contractor the door? Aside from doing the job properly, the contractor has zero obligation to the company whose property he's working on.
In the 2-3 days after the glitch, when "there was an emergency on the multimillion dollar tool I was working on", I think it was good of the worker to not get hung up on the contract status and trust that it could be worked out by people in good faith.
Workers and management on a team ought to be able to trust each other to that degree, even if we understand that the interests of all parties are not fully aligned. That trust goes both ways.
Take that too far, tolerating abuse of trust, and you betray your obligation to yourself. But in small amounts, it's admirable.
Do you seriously think I'm suggesting that they stay indefinitely without pay?
Or, if you are saying that they shouldn't stay even for a day, even in the face of an emergency, then I disagree. Even if they don't have a legal obligation to do so, I respect those who would, like this worker. And I would prefer to work along such people as colleagues, trusting that if they could help it, they wouldn't leave their team in the lurch.
I don't like the idea that complete lack of trust and hairtrigger hostility should be the default mode of workforce participation.
There's no moral obligation to work without pay, even for one day, even if you've gotten "promises" that you'll be made whole. An ethical company would send him home if they didn't know they could pay him or not, whatever the reason. If they need him to work THAT DAY because of some corporate "emergency", they should pay him cash on the barrelhead or make a similar arrangement, until they can get his regular paychecks going again.
As advice to a worker in this situation, it certainly makes sense to gut it out and take the risk of doing work without pay. It's, for most people, probably a much smaller risk than risking getting "really" fired without first having another job lined up.
For what it's worth, I attribute the worst amoral behavior to corporate personhood rather than capitalism. Thus my preferred remedy is to eliminate corporate personhood, rather than capitalism.
What if the worker stayed, expecting that the company would make things right, but when it was discovered that companies simply don't DO that and haven't since the 1980s, files a lawsuit or otherwise takes aggressive action to force the company to treat them fairly?
The part of being ethical in business outside the legalise still holds?
I would agree with your point of professional contracting: contract for the worst and write out scenarios in contracts.
In this case though the employer acted in a way that signalled renewal and the contractor delivered in good faith. Back to contract law and ethics: are services delivered possibly without contract but in good faith without value and compensation?
Not sure how this works in other jurisdictions in the EU but in Germany a work contract can be silently renewed if both parties act as if it had been renewed even if the contract itself says it has to be renewed explicitly and in writing.
If you keep showing up to work and your superiors keep managing you (and especially if you keep getting paid) the contract remains valid beyond its stated expiry date.
Failure to pay employees is "wage theft" in the USA.
The Netherlands sounds a bit employer friendly in the UK mess up at all in firing some one you automatically lose even if the employee is as guilty as sin and was caught bang to rights
> Why has this company not made their loyal worker whole?
IMO because the generally demonstrated position of the labor force is that companies do not have to (which I hate, to be clear).
IMO, employees buy into the employer/owner-propogated myth that they are "lucky to be employed." As a result, employees greatly undervalue their labor and give up any leverage to make employers do the right thing.
Having been around the block a few times, I view 'work' as a transaction in which my employer and I need to realize fairly mutual benefits: most people don't. Employees generally see jobs and titles as a way to assess their societal value. And employers, knowing that, can do pretty much anything they want to people, dangling the occasional carrot to encourage higher worker output, but mostly working w/sticks.
This is also contributes to the zero real wage growth in a supposedly tight job market.
TLDR: power dynamics and poor 'game play' on the part of employees
He elaborates a bit in the comments - it seems he's entitled to the money, but couldn't be bothered: "So I had to do an appeal, and go through a long process that I did not care much to go through. I had a mind in quitting after all."
Sounds very strange that he wouldn't care to do a bit of paperwork, which he from the sounds of it could probably well justify to do on company time, with the manager and director being supportive. Or get the agency to do it for him, and bill them for the trouble. Or whatever. Something smells a bit fishy about that part of the story.
The bit about the manager and director is in the main article. There's nothing about pay, but they're presented as entirely sympathetic and angry about the system on his behalf.
As for "fishy", I find it very strange that someone writes an article emphasising twice that they're out three weeks of pay, but then couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. There's breach of contract, this isn't a long and arduous appeals process, it's open and shut, and if it isn't you have a lawyer deal with it, and recoup expenses, too. And if the guy just doesn't care about it, then why does he mention it twice?
And for the purposes of this, and the other sub-thread that is incredulous about this, this is not an American thing: If you're a contractor in Europe, and you don't get paid, and you then don't do anything about that, then you don't get paid. There's no process that automatically fixes things when the aggrieved party doesn't ask for them to be fixed (and yes, even in Europe, there's a bit of annoying process and paperwork to deal with).
The article is written, I think, to criticize the reliance on machines—not this individual company. I don't think he wrote it out of a grudge.
Even if he's legally entitled to the money, bringing a lawyer into the mix is likely to sour his relationship with his client (he's a contractor), and—rightly or wrongly—could give him a bad reputation in the local community, making it harder to find work in the future.
I'll also note that small, claims court might be able to handle a case over just a few weeks pay. He wouldn't need a lawyer for that. The risk and costs of losing are more manageable. He could send some emails about the pay he lost asking nicely citing the work he did while there. Then firmly. Then, once at a better employer, he can take the case to small, claims court.
I'd actually rather people sue over this to establish some kind of case law where companies' legal teams tell their management to make a default policy of giving the missed pay on demand. There might already be case law on it.
I suspect this is the difference. If this company is incapable of not firing someone, I imagine their appeals process could be equally miserable. Sure, maybe the manager and director want to repay him, but actually releasing funds to pay someone who "wasn't employed" is going involve a lengthy battle with some HR/Accounting computer system that just wants its invariants not to vary. Depending on somebody's financial position, I can see them deciding to just walk away on even a large chunk of money to avoid the mess.
The good thing about places like that is (a) they don't actually care about the money, it's a rounding error. For some smaller firms paying someone for three weeks of not working (regardless of fault) could actually be a problem. (b) They also have a legal department who's invariant is "don't get sued for breach of contract because of a stupid mistake that a small cheque can make go away".
But, of course, the author is perfectly within his rights to just not pursue this, and I have no idea what processes he'd been told to expect for this -- it's just strange that he would emphasise something he doesn't care about in the post.
> a legal department who's invariant is "don't get sued for breach of contract
This is a good point. I was thinking that no matter how trivial the money, actually dragging a check out of the accounting system would be a serious hurdle. But the solution I missed would be to sic legal on it - their machine tends to beat out everyone else's.
“Made available? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the appeals department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the forms, didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes I did. They were made available in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'”
During the 1980s, one idea became paramount in business management schools, books, seminars, etc: The worker must be disposable. Any worker who becomes important to the success of the organization must be fired immediately upon this realization. If you permit that person to remain, they will become even more integral to the organization. Eventually, they will realize this and ask for more pay. Eventually, they will want pay which is greater than industry standard for workers in their position. That can never be permitted to occur (lest the industry standard wage rise), so they will have to be fired at that point. And then, the loss will do great damage. Best to fire them as soon as they become indispensible and deal with the smaller amount of damage then.
This sort of thinking kind of makes sense in a world where almost every company is a big factory company with their workers primarily doing repetitive physical labor. And the business management world has not adapted at all to the transition to mental labor. Their businesses fail and suffer for this, but as it's a universal condition (yes even among Google and such... if the company has a physical office, then they haven't even done the obvious to benefit from the move to mental work) there's not much pressure motivating change.
A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that it is possible "but not now". The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man that he accepts them "so that you do not think you have failed to do anything." The man does not attempt to murder or hurt the doorkeeper to gain the law, but waits at the door until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years. The doorkeeper answers "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."
I had this problem with my health care. With the new software they are using the doctor has to click each prescription every year and ask me about it. I guess he didn't click one and when it came time to get a refill it wouldn't let me have it. It used his credentials to un-prescribe it, the pharmacy said he cancelled the prescription. On my next appointment I asked about it and he had no idea and re-prescribed it (it was high blood pressure medication not anything addictive)... He was upset about it the computer changing what he wanted.
I am actually going through this right now. I'm in a position that renews yearly. I'm a regular employee but it's the way this kind of position works (I'm being a little vague on purpose to avoid personal identification). Before renewal I talked to the officer manager, he sent everything over to HR a few weeks early.... which seems to be the mistake.
HR let it sit on their desk and then forgot. My office manager is working at getting them to fix it ASAP. I've already missed one paycheck (which I will receive eventually).
First hint was a notice that I am going to be losing email access soon (which I still have currently). Then I lost keycard access to the building and office (it unlocks automatically at a set time, so I can still get in eventually). I've lost access to some of the resources we have (not critical to my job at this point). Got a letter in the mail about COBRA. Got a letter in the mail about retirement. I'm wondering when I will lose access to our wifi and cluster.
When I returned, I got an email a few days later from a 3rd party survey company with the subject ”Exit Survey” which began “We’re sorry you’ll be leaving Yahoo soon.”
I was confused and so was my boss. Turns out some automated process included people who recently concluded a sabbatical in a mailing list for people who recently resigned...
I'd rather be fired by a machine than fired by a database. In this guy's case, everyone of importance was on his side, it was just a technical matter to get the situation resolved in his favor.
In my case, there was a decision that employees like me would be paid out of the server budget. And then a subsequent decision came down: fire the employees that are getting paid out of the server budget! Of my department, regardless of how well we did our jobs, regardless of pay, regardless of length of employment, some of us had the 'paid like a server' checkbox checked and some of us didn't. The ones that didn't were kept on.
I've had this happen, myself and an employee who I had signed the termination paperwork for shared the same first name and someone put my name in instead of his. It was hell for at least a month as different automated systems kicked in and disabled my accounts, benefits, and payments.
Worse, the first notification email happened while I was presenting to the CEO and the HR contact in the meeting had noticed half way through that I had been fired. Queue jokes of "was the presentation that bad?". No one was able to stop the machine because no one really knew all the different processes or they weren't built to stop midway.
> No one was able to stop the machine because no one really knew all the different processes or they weren't built to stop midway.
This is (in my opinion) one of the reasons why everyone talking about getting rid of dedicated IT ops in their organizations is making a mistake. You can have devs building integrations and automation all day, but you still need sysadmins who can see the whole picture and override them when necessary. Having an outsourced (or even internal) hell desk that goes off a script doesn't take care of situations like this either.
Don't worry, you can still pay outlandish prices for top tier A-Z support, where you can argue for a week with a drone that no, their system is not properly following the HTTP RFC, and here's the TCP dumps to prove it.
Imagine if we didn't have an operations engineer who knew how to trace down the problem using a TCP dump. Or if it had been a developer who was, by the proper "DevOps" hygenics, denied access to the boxes to run TCP dumps.
Yeah, they're fixing it. No, we don't have a timeline.
The worst bit is that someone internal to that business has probably also noticed that the system isn't properly following the HTTP RFC and is fighting the machine themselves to get it fixed with similar results.
I had a situation once, when Symantec firewall stopped working on my company laptop. Not the whole SEP suite, not the antivirus, just the firewall part. After 2 months I got my first angry email from robot, then I started getting them every month with big red text trying to scare me with every possible corporate hell, and it gradually started to CC it to higher and higher management in the company. Meanwhile nobody could fix it and it didn't help that IT support was outsourced to another country (I called them several times with zero results). At some point said managers started visiting me personally (because I assume their inaction was escalated even further). In the end nobody fixed this specifically, but I managed to accidentally do it when fixing virtualbox install - after increasing some obscure "Network Filter" limit in Windows both SEP and VB started working again.
I think wasn't auto fired like OP only because such trigger wasn't implemented in the company, yet. No IT support available can be really bad.
Every so often, I see a 'brilliant' claim like "99% of what IT does is routine, so it should be outsourced or even automated!"
The percentage is debatable, but the more important issue is what that 1% looks like. Because it's definitely not 1% of their value, it's the high-stakes stuff that needs a context-aware human to apply a fix or good decision in place of whatever The Machine is trying to do.
(And if you're going to keep experts on full time to handle the occasional 1% case, there's no longer much reason to outsource everything else.)
>>"Thomas Midgley, Jr. (1889–1944) was an American engineer and chemist who contracted polio at age 51, leaving him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. He became accidentally entangled in the ropes and died of strangulation at the age of 55. However, he is better known for two of his other inventions: the tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive to gasoline, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).[19][20][21]"
Wow, talk about someone who really never learned the importance of thinking things through.
Now I want to see a story that takes the "lost in the company" myth to farcical extremes, with an entire legion of stormtroopers having to fend for themselves in a remote corner of a Superduper Star Destroyer.
577 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 388 ms ] threadAs the system matures and the edge cases become better understood it can become more automated. At first, though, leave it loose and human-powered wherever you can.
Keep the decision in the hands of a human but let the machine do the grunt work.
It's both good and bad, but typically a contractor gets a higher rate than an employee since health insurance, etc is not provided.
In the end he's still a "contractor" in the eyes of the company, and typically if something goes wrong, he's gonna be the first to go.
Does a staffing agency pay as a W-2 employee and provide an insurance plan?
I'm a contractor (1099) so I buy my own insurance. So I have it...
In either of the above cases, the company where I do my work does not provide my insurance.
Not necessarily. Some will, but the coverage is usually not awesome. Then the question is, do you want the health insurance, or is it better to get obamacare because the staffing agency is likely going to be more temporary?
I'm becoming more an more of a believer that health insurance should be separate from employment. Mostly because your health is permanent and employment is most likely temporary.
The problem is that not everyone wants to live in Detroit, KC, LA, Chicago, say. So instead they fly back and forth.
I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?
Since they are a contractor, it also seems like perhaps the company that they are actually employed with should be paying them for the contract company’s screwup. That would also probably heavily incentivize the company they actually work for to put pressure on the contractee to fix the issue.
The system did exactly what it was intended to do, it was the humans who screwed up. Humans who presumably understood the way the system was designed, and didn't care enough to do some due diligence.
>I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?
He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions.
The real lesson here is that few of us, no matter how much money we make, how into the culture we are or how long our tenure has been, are more than a row in a database to our employer, and we can be dropped at any time. The contractor in this case would not have had much more "job security" with humans in the loop.
There's basically a certainty that it was a violation of his contract and company policies that made it not legally sound. A company can also pay whoever it wants for any reason.
Of course, he's also well within his rights to sue over it.
If he missed out on pay then it's because no one cared enough/someone didn't care enough to sort it out.
But, it depends! It's never black and white for this stuff. It'd be an interesting case though, and I'm sure it's happened before!
Yeah, judging from this thread and the negative scores on some of my comments, I was way off base about that.
It was the humans who designed and who chose to deploy a system without a human in the loop, and without an override (even after a director was involved) that screwed up.
If you build an automation system that goes out of human control after a human error, that is a failed design.
Unless it was designed with the intent that human intervention should be impossible once a process was started. That would make it a very poor design, but not a failed one.
I've seen lots of internal software that doesn't have failsafes or rollbacks - the operator is simply trained to follow procedure and then is expected to follow it. Software that considers operator error is more complex, and therefore more expensive, to produce. Cost often supersedes quality or flexibility when these systems are developed.
If there is a physical process that cannot be stopped (rocket, nuclear reactor, oil well) then of course the system must be designed around that physical fact.
But this is an HR process. The "moving parts" are people.
If it was designed with the intent that human intervention should be impossible, the design was a failure.
Perhaps more likely it was just a failure of implementation (there's a cancel button but nobody knows where) or of imagination (nobody thought about whether the process could be canceled or not).
What if instead of HR, this was a financial process, playing out over days or weeks, entirely beyond the company's control. Would any sane CFO approve such a thing?
> Cost often supersedes quality or flexibility
That helps to explain it, but it doesn't excuse it.
Somebody who is in your building, is doing work under your direction, and has not been told they are fired hasn't been fired. A judge in court for the lost wages would laugh you out of the room if you tried a "well but actually, the system..." argument in that situation.
- When I first started, it took months to get me added to the project phase to bill my time.
- When I was finally added, I couldn't bill it because that project phase was over
- Then a few months to find a solution, then I was asked to bill to the new project phase
- I couldn't bill my old time to the new project phase as it wasn't running in the time I first started.
The bank kept promising they'd work out a way for me together compensated for the time. They continued to do this after I ended the contract.
I kept chasing them, and they went quiet. Then they said they weren't paying me for the time I worked because I hadn't entered my time correctly, then blamed me for walking out the door before I'd been paid the money they owed.
I called a lawyer. nab responded as above. The lawyer told nab that Australian law doesn't care about their billing system - mentioning the specific law helped.
They paid all the money a week later. I should have asked for costs and interest too, but oh well.
They might be, or might not be. Constructive dismissal is a thing.
Constructive dismissal is dismissal, for all intents and purposes, without being fired.
Once a year human resources would decide my 'contract' was up and order IT to terminate my network access and payroll to stop paying me. Had another lady got hired from contract around the same time. The day she started working they terminated her email account and it took them six weeks to restore it.
You can't just say "nah nah I fired you two weeks ago hah!"
No! It happened in the middle of a contract which wasn't terminated. There's no two ways of looking at it. A wrong termination date entered somewhere doesn't change the contract.
> Paying people not in your employ is fraud, [...]
The person was still employed. If anything in this story was fraud, it was the company stopping payment based on a wrong termination date. They even knew the date was wrong and still didn't pay. Clear-cut case!
Of course, if the parties later agree that the contract was in fact canceled at that point, that's how it is. Because parties can agree to cancel a contract. What a sucker though in this case.
It does seem like there are two ways of looking at it.
As I read the article, the employee's manager needed to renew his contract, which he failed to do. And this is a literal quote by OP from the article:
The wrong termination date wasn't entered, the correct, existing termination date wasn't updated in time. Those are two different scenarios.the problem is in the way the workflow is described/implemented - and even with that we would need to see some numbers around how many times the workflow ran vs issues encountered.
When you put in the killswitch, is this for a step, for a workflow, for a subsystem, for the whole thing? It’s alluring to think that you have the option to stop everything, but do you really want to stop everything if there are thousands of things happening in the system? Can a human think through what happens to what in this situation? If the builders of the system missed it, what are the odds that an operator will catch it?
For example: gas stations. They have a big red button that stops everything. If a pump if on fire it makes sense. If the trash can near the pump is full and you cannot throw your garbage away would anyone stop everything for the can to be emptied?
Edit: Slight disclaimer, "work at companies like this" in a software/IT role...
It's bizarre to me to work for a company where I don't know close to everyones name. This kind of junk never happens in small companies.
However, a promo at Google is a huge deal. I really wanted the promotion to go through, so that I would have that level if I decided to re-join Google (or even so that go/epitaphs would match my resume). My manager and HRBP managed to get it sorted out, but it was a pain.
I actually stayed an extra week to receive the promo.
I was due for a performance review about a week before I handed my notice in at my old job. The review didn't happen because my boss was incapable of communicating with his employees and actually scheduling appointments with them, but had it happened, I was fully prepared to push for a payrise, even though it would only be a couple of dollars an hour, and for only 3 weeks.
You wouldn't turn down a promotion because you know you're about to hand your notice in. You act like everything is normal and you're going to be working at the company for the foreseeable future, right until the day you hand your notice in, which should be at the minimum notice period.
Otherwise what would happen if you decline a promotion, then your new job offer falls through? You'd be left looking like a prize dick.
Too late though. :)
They don't stay, and you end up wasting a perfectly valid promotion while some one who would stick longer with you could have got it.
Your old manager may have said that to encourage you to stay, but at the end of the day he will promote whoever needs to be promoted in order for that person not to leave. It is all very simple offer and demand at the end of the day.
I was once in a company where the CEO liked to brag that in this company everyone is fairly paid in regards to their competences. You can guess what happened next, we went to have a couple beers with colleagues one evening and started talking about salaries. We realized that we had salaries that didn't really match what the CEO was pretending. The laws of the market are simply too strong, you will always need to sometime pay someone a lot because of circumstances or because that person had another offer to match.
At the end of the day, companies benefit a lot from information asymmetry (they know everyone's salary, but you know nothing). They can claim a lot of things without you having the ability to verify it.
Maybe someone just unassigned your employee id to the role, because in reality you weren't actually taking the job!
> I resigned just after I had gotten a promotion, but before the date when the promo was effective
If I get sick before my insurance is effective...I don't get my coverage.
If I resign before my raise is effective...I don't get my raise.
All of this is what "effective" means.
As I understand it, it goes like this:
In my understanding, the employee's resignation is to be effective after the promotion it to be effective, so that the they would resign with the new/promoted level.I understand the surprise.
I had interpreted that as being resignation effective before the promotion. But I was probably wrong.
On the one hand, you have been promoted to a new role, so you have reached a compatible level of expertise. You can put that role on your resume and sell yourself.
On the other hand, you never, ever actually performed in that role, with the new responsibilities. How can you list that on your resume !
I am not sure what is the right answer here... but as your new employer I would take your last promotion with a big grain of salt. A resume is not a score sheet of levels accomplished in a game, it is a list of things your have actually done.
A promotion is a _recognition_ that you are _already_ operating at a given level. It's an acknowledgement by TPTB that you deserve a given title.
Anything less than this leads to a result where you may not actually be performing at the level the new title requires, which means you could conceivably be promoted and immediately fail to meet expectations in the new role.
aka the peter principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)
For example, is someone with level I is up for level II promo, she/he has to match level II criteria long before actual promotion is due.
In reality promotions mostly happen in organizations due to political lobbying with the powers.
Even in these 'decent' tech companies you will see some people getting rapidly promoted and moving up the hierarchy, while genuine performers are stuck in the process and minutiae. Its just what kind of leverage your manager has with the upper management.
I think everyone should at least experience once to what length a company can go in order to keep someone they really need that threatens to leave. It happened once to me: in a 150k people company that had a well defined promotion model very similar to Google. I gave my resignation notice and suddenly all the HR pep talk was out of the roof. I gained two levels and was promoted to director level.I still left but felt stupid I didn't threaten to leave earlier.
It made me realize that there are two types of workers. The ones that will play fair game and believe the HR pep talk, as we just saw in the previous comments, and the ones that realize that the fastest way to go is to bypass this and play politics in order to fastrack it. It is another type of skill.
Companies are not living systems and in general its just people making decisions.
I've been walked over many times now, but once, after all the work, I was nominated for an award the company's annual meet. My manager, his manager and all the way up assured me that based on what I had done the award was coming my way. I was even asked to prepare a small speech to give on the stage, they even asked for a photo to put up on slide deck with a small bio.
Two days before the meet, my manager and the director called me into a meeting room to tell me that I wouldn't be getting the award, and they didn't want it to be painful surprise to me during the meet. And they had tried everything they could.
Eventually my manager told me during lunch later that big time political lobbying had gone into this, and VP making decisions had no option as he would be cornered politically on other issues, if he didn't relent to demands of rewards from other corners.
Google or any other company. Performance has nothing to do with how you get paid/rewarded in any company.
The span at the level lower than your performance is accommodated by an excellent bonus and stock refresh.
For what it's worth - that's not necessarily true. Several places I have worked gave promotions in retrospect - after you have been performing the additional responsibilities for a while. It's sort of like a 'dry run' - they want to make sure you can do it before officially thrusting it on you.
https://csimarket.com/stocks/GOOG-Revenue-per-Employee.html
A very logical thing to do. In big companies it takes time to build a case for a promotion(position). If you were not going to use it, it was always a good thing to give it to somebody else.
Plus asking somebody to sustain a position for somebody who was promoted and still wants to leave seems like bonkers even from the HR perspective.
As you say, all-in-one systems have their drawbacks, but usually at least can handle situations like this. But piles of shell scrips to make unrelated systems talk to each other often lack error handling and rollback.
Sounds like the same sorts of problems you'd get with an enterprise service bus (ESB). Glad those have fallen out of favor for good :)
I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point.
What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch.
So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next day I actually get a phone call from one of their support staff.
He says my transaction was flagged as "suspicious" by the fraud prevention system. So I asked, okay... but now a Human has looked at it, can you manually approve the transaction? The answer was "No, I am not allowed to tell you why".
I was incredulous, so I asked "Wait... you acknowledge that I'm not a scammer or a terrorist (since my PP account still worked and does to this day), and the party I'm trying to purchase from is obviously not either since they're still accepting PP, but The Machine thinks there is something fishy about us two specifically and there is no way for someone to manually approve this transaction?"
And he said something to the tune of "Yes. I'm sorry, but there is nothing I or anyone at PP can do about it, and for security reasons we're unable to offer further details."
So yeah. This was just a minor nuisance for me, I purchased similar services elsewhere. But the whole thing was a real eye-opener. That was the day I realized that there is no pleading or reasoning with The Machine.
Weapons of Math Destruction was one of the most eye opening books I read recently. It's all about how Machines when set up with self-reinforcing models can become a real big problem.
And how the fact nobody quite understands how The Machine makes decisions isn't helping either.
My solution would be to not rely too much on these systems, but at the very least, at least include escape hatches and big red emergency buttons. Engineers do, why can't hackers do this?
That can be difficult if security features rely on humans not being able to subvert the process, I think. But for other processes, this should be the default!
Once we let the machines make the decisions, and rely on them to do a "better job" there will be cases like this where it's just cheaper and easier to just follow the program and explain what happened.
Actually we are building a zoo for ourselves where humans will make no decisions at all about anything of consequence!
The metrics* gathered on us were pretty meaningless, and didn't meet the cardinal rule of being actionable, but we still had to go over them each and every week. And some of the actual work was producing reports on productivity for other parts of the company in different places.
*Despite the fact we were programmers and every person in the department had a different role, we were scored based on tickets done and tickets that failed qa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_3411_inc...
Presumably someday cryptocurrencies will be able to fill the PayPal niche, but that requires a more robust buyer-merchant ecosystem than exists at present.
I started accepting donations from a community gaming website via PayPal and I was very hesitant about using it due to the bad stories I've heard. A couple of months and a couple of hundreds of dollars later, no problems yet.
The biggest 'problem' I've had with PayPal is moving to a new country. You can't add International cards to your account, and you can't change the country of your PayPal account. The only solution for me was to create a new account, which is fine I guess.
But then I guess you never have a bad experience until you do.
How is that not a bad experience for a buyer who never got an item he paid for?
No postal system is without risk; that’s why they offer package insurance, registered post, etc.
Every real merchant who deals with the public at scale accepts this and refunds in such cases. Presumably they eat the cost or THEY purchase insurance for the shipping and roll this into the cost so they don't have to tell customers I'm spending YOUR money on drugs and hookers and don't care if you actually got anything for it.
Such interactions absolutely destroy relationships with customers and the customers bank is likely to issue a charge back to protect their relationship with their customers.
In my personal life on the other hand, I'm regularly prompted at checkout to decide between registered post with insurance, or regular post without. If I opted out of insurance, I wouldn't blame the seller for the package not arriving or any damage (presuming of course that it was packaged appropriately), and I'd fully expect Paypal to resolve in their favour after verifying that the package was actually sent.
It's true that this would ruin the customer relationship which is why some businesses may offer to make things right anyway, but I personally wouldn't expect it.
That said, the consumer protection laws in my country (Australia) are fairly strong so I may well be entitled to redress; this is just my personal attitude.
The buyer kept emailing me after it, 'updating' me on the situation, which I mostly ignored. I believe he was in some smaller town and he knew the postman and had a very strong suspicion that he stole it, or something like that.
I wrote about it here: https://www.cogini.com/blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failur...
As a buyer, I don't care for that feature of Bitcoin.
Why will this be any cheaper, or safer, or fairer with Bitcoin? All the incentives in this business align with the buyer. 90% of the time, I have a choice between many equivalent merchants, all of whom want my business. I will go with the one that supports my cash-back credit card - whose issuer will almost always side with me in a dispute.
Once these escrow services become popular in the crypto world, you're back to square one. The reasons for why PayPal sucks for some of its users have nothing to do with fiat money, and everything to do with the nature of the escrow business. It would be just as shitty for said users if it transacted in Bitcoin, Dogecoin, or silver bullion.
The mediator can decide against your case just like Paypal or Visa can. Even worse, now I have to find some random mediator the seller trusts.
How is that better than plain bank transactions or paypal? The fees are not even cheaper for that "privilege" of having some random mediator play paypal-on-the-blockchain.
I've had them be annoying to me before. My favorite PP fact I found out the hard way: never put the string 'aleph' in the note field. Apparently that's flagged as a Terror-Word(tm), and it held up a transaction of mine for over a month.
I still use them, but only under modified-casino rules: never play with money you can't lose. Have a separate bank account just for them, so they can't get up to shenanigans with more than you intend; never depend on them for anything time sensitive; and never send money anyone depends on for anything important.
As far as alternatives, customers seem to love PayPal, because they side with buyers effectively 100% of the time in any disputes. So even if there were a convenient PayPal clone (which there isn't, at least in the US), you still wouldn't match the conversion rate that PayPal has, as many people will only use PayPal.
So, you can either accept a lower conversion rate by going with something like Stripe (because users don't want to enter their CC information directly on small merchant sites), or you can accept PayPal and be essentially guaranteed that at some point your account will be closed and you'll be screwed out of a significant amount of revenue. Currently, these are the bad choices that merchants face.
I've won disputes on PayPal as a seller.
Companies have been using PayPal for over a decade without their accounts being closed.
You're talking nonsense.
There are exceptions to every rule, but in the vast majority of cases, they side with buyers. I once had someone that admitted in email that they were trying to extort me into refunding them. PayPal actually wrote back saying they were going to go to bat for me with the card issuer after I showed them these emails, but the card issuer didn't budge. I have no idea if PayPal sent the card issuer the emails, I just know that I wound up being out the money.
So you aren't just fighting with PayPal, you're fighting with card issuers as well. PayPal will side with buyers in most cases, and in the few instances where it is obvious that the merchant is correct and PayPal tries to do the right thing, then the card issuer will pick it up and screw the merchant from their side of it.
Regardless of who does the screwing, the merchant is the one that suffers in the end by accepting PayPal.
Companies have been using PayPal for over a decade without their accounts being closed.
Very large companies have nothing to worry about from PayPal, but small merchants have a very high percentage chance of being screwed by them. See http://www.paypalsucks.com/
Now suppose it turns out I have misrepresented the items I sell. When your item arrives, you find that my site was pretty much fraud. You try to contact me to demand a refund...but no one answers the phone or responds to email. That's because I took all the money from you and the rest of the people I deceived and moved far away, to someplace safe from extradition to the US and that won't enforce US civil judgments.
So you call up your credit card company, tell them what happened, and they quickly refund your money. As do the credit card companies of all the other people I took advantage of.
Where does the credit card company get the money for all those refunds? They aren't going to get it from me. They certainly have no interest in eating those losses themselves.
What they do is require a business that accepts credit cards to have an account at a "merchant bank". When someone pays that business by credit card, the credit card company does not pay the business directly. They pay the merchant bank, which pays the business.
In order to be allowed to do this, the merchant bank has to enter into a contract with the credit card company that says that the merchant bank will pay the credit card company for all refunds and chargebacks. The merchant bank will try to get the refund money from the business, but if they fail they have to make up the difference.
The way merchant banks do this is they hold back some of the money they receive from the credit card company for the business, to build up a buffer to cover refunds and chargebacks. As the business establishes a track record and the merchant bank becomes more confident in its estimates of the refund/chargeback risk for the business, they will adjust the amount they hold in reserve.
I don't know exactly how it works when a buyer uses a credit card to pay PayPal, but somewhere between the credit card company and the seller there is an entity taking the role of the merchant bank and guaranteeing that the credit card company won't be left holding the bag if the seller can't cover refunds/chargebacks.
I suspect that the entity is PayPal itself, and most of the incidents you hear about of them holding some seller's money is them increasing the reserve because there was some change in his selling pattern that suggested the current reserve was no longer in line with their estimates of his refund/chargeback risk.
I think people don't switch to alternatives because the alternatives, at least the ones that provide strong consumer protection, almost all have the same or similar mechanisms to try to make sure that if the seller is bad it is the seller who pays.
They could switch to alternatives that do pay the seller directly with no mechanism for a refund other than asking the seller, such as most cryptocurrencies, but then they would probably lose a lot of buyers unless they were very well established businesses with outstanding reputations. (But if that were the case, then they probably could accept credit cards without their merchant bank requiring a large reserve).
To give a little behind-the-scenes here, I worked for a bit for a web hosting company that had this as standard policy. This was because, before it was put in place, scammers would actually use coordinated campaigns of support calls with otherwise legitimate accounts in order to extract piecemeal details about how the company's fraud investigations worked, then reorganize their scamming to precisely evade the time periods and credit card checks used at the time.
> The hackers explained that they were able to breach the banks’ sub-par security by using an algorithm to generate account numbers and then posing as customers who had forgotten their passwords.
“They were giving too much permission to half-authenticated account which enabled us to grab all these information,” the email said, adding that the system “was not checking if a password was valid until the security question were input correctly.”
Source: https://www.ccn.com/hackers-demand-1-million-in-xrp-after-br...
It may be possible that PP thought someone else was using your account.
What should happen in these scenarios is simply a validation of some kind ie payment only goes through if you click on the email your received.
I used to travel to SF from Canada a lot and my bank would block my Visa even though I told them not to.
In the US there's no password in Visas, i.e. no chip-and-pin, which is totally crazy = huge fraud.
It's funny to think in the Silicon Valley, top tech companies in the world ... everyone is still using that old mag stripe stuff when pretty much the rest of the world has moved on.
To be clear, this is chip (and sometimes signature for large purchases) but not chip-and-pin, so the original statement of no passwords generally holds true, but the mag stripes are generally not used anymore.
It's the other way around. If you try the chip 3+ times, and it doesn't work, you can swipe the card, and the swipe transaction will work.
When the more secure method fails, it falls back to the less secure one. It's lunacy.
The chips also don’t seem to last as long as the magstripes for some reason (which makes zero sense when you think about it). I’ve had to get my card replaced 3x in the space of two years.
Since a relatively small number of complaints ruins the parent companies perception of how well the individual store is doing as far as customer service the store level doesn't want anything to inconvenience their customers especially since literally 99.9999% of swipes are from legit customers not thieves.
After PayPal refusing to help. I resolved it by opening a new PayPal account. Adding my credit card (not flagged suspicious) and transfer $2 to the account. Then I could delink the bank account and close it. Then I closed the new account I opened.
I donno. This is PayPal Australia, maybe they operate differently. I couldn’t even figure out how my account got into a negative balance to begin with.
Unfortunately I don’t have any of the old emails otherwise I would upload it.
This is what I received from Paypal:
To ensure that activity and transactions comply with current regulations, PayPal is requesting that you provide the following information via email to ComplianceTransactions@paypal.com
1. Purpose of payment XXXXXXXXXXXX attempted on 29 May 2016 in the amount of 53.00 AUD, including a complete and detailed explanation of the goods or services you intended to purchase. Please also explain the transaction message: "Cuba and postage to 4113. <my address>."
They obviously have a block on the word "Cuba" and there was some back and forth to let the transaction through.
Of course, they could provide no information about why this happened or how to avoid it. I became a lot more conservative about using Paypal again, and never did make another request for a debit card.
I try to pay with my prepaid card directly whenever I can.
>Hundred of thousands of records were missing and the web interface was not responding.
Are you sure you guys didn't have an attacker on the loose?
The automated system flagged my account a second time a few weeks later, and when I appealed they simply said that although they didn't see any evidence of rule-breaking behavior, nobody got caught by the automated system twice unless they were cheating.
I was out over $100, and I didn't even get six months to play the game. Sometimes The Machine just "knows best".
I'd also further assert, that simply being an HN reader means you are more likely to trigger a false positive than the rest of the population. Blizzard does some very aggressive memory scans, and they look for tools that are much more common with developers than the rest of the population. I've personally used a well known library for code injection, that if I'd had it running on an unrelated binary while playing WoW they would have seen the signature of the library, and likely Blizzard would have eventually banned my account.
I don't know if the parent was doing things that Blizzard considers naughty or not, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt given what I've read about Blizzard's Warden.
Some cursory research told me that new accounts with a lot of market activity were a "red flag" for the automated system due to similarity with bots that created new accounts to evade bans, which I guess makes sense. Of course this is the internet and you have no particular reason to believe I was or wasn't cheating on World of Warcraft, but for what it's worth this HN account is linked to my real identity and if I were cheating all the time I would know better than to brag about it or even obliquely reference it in my posting here.
Yours is simply the latest in a line of those who have followed the letter of their Auction House rules, but not the nebulous and unwritten "spirit".
In that instance, The Machine Cleaned Out My Desk.
I had a cubicle at the company HQ, but was for some period of time working from home in another state. I still kept quite a few things in the cubicle (notebooks, mugs, etc), which I used when I was in the area.
When I finally came back, I noticed, after a month or two, that my office number has not been updated in the system (from being "HOME OFFICE"), and sent a request to IT to change it.
The next day I came back to see a pristine desk.
With all my stuff gone.
See, my request to update the office number triggered a relocation request. The system, in preparation of the move-in of the "new" tenant (me) into my cubicle, has removed all the belongings of the previous tenant (which also happened to be me).
Luckily, all the removed stuff was put in a box, which I got back several days later, after my manager found the right person in the facilities dept.
Just goes to show that automating even the simplest procedures can be very tricky - and that perhaps it's best to have people on-site manually approve any destructive steps.
Something like this happened to me too at a previous employer, some things I recovered but many were just gone, the cleaning staff apparently help themselves to stuff that “former” employees leave behind, so my fancy headphones for example were just gone. Fucks given by HR/facilities? Zero. One of many similar incidents for me and my cow-orkers. And this was a desk move literally from one row to another!
It wasn’t even an algorithm per se, most of the “machine” at this place was people in India following checklists manually. You could speak to them (tho' they made this very difficult to do) and tell them to stop and they would say “yes” and do it anyway.
I had a friend at another company who was mistakenly terminated, a week later his manager called him at home to find out if he was OK, the conversation apparently went,
Are you sick? What happened?
You fired me you bastard!
No I didn't! Please come back!
Too late now, I have another job.
Especially since you could tell them to stop and they would say "yes" and then carry on anyway...
Another story from the same company, group A would enter their requirements into system 1, group B would pick up work tickets from system 2. Group A thought that group B were idiots who could never do anything right, and group B thought that group A were idiots who could never make up their minds what they wanted.
But the real problem was group C who maintained systems 1 and 2 and "integrated" them with people in India manually rekeying from one to the other with frequent typos. They thought they were saving money but never considered the cost of delays and re-work in groups A and B...
This was discussed/commented on at length a couple of weeks ago. In Indian culture, apparently, the "yes" is like a verbal tick - kinda - and just acknowledges you've spoken without giving any commitment to doing anything (nor indeed indicating any level of understanding).
“Good”
Tons of people have this exchange out of politeness. The person asking “How are you?” doesn’t really want to know details. The person answering is expected to be brief and positive. It’s only among friends that the same question is expected to get an honest and detailed answer.
—“How do you do?”
tipping of hats ensues
I don't even really blame the cleaners; people left expensive electronics, phones, wallets, whatever on their desks all the time, never any issues at all, I don't think any of them would have taken anything that wasn't from the pile, it was probably at least tacitly sanctioned by their management (who probably helped themselves first too).
automating business processes is actually a similar activity to doing programming!
When it's done competently, the business runs smoother. But if there are bugs (and as anyone who programs knows, there are always bugs), things go wrong. And yet, people who know not anything about complex systems design attempt to write up business requirements for such automation are numourus.
Or, almost certainly cheaper, manually deal with the 1 in 10,000 case like yours.
In this case, a simple notes field in the request system would perhaps have sufficed. Perhaps there is/was, and it wasn't filled out because it wasn't recognized as being some manner of exceptional request. Perhaps if there was manual approval, removal of your stuff would still have been approved.
It's literally impossible to catch all of these, because human error will creep in. Sounds to me like your case was dealt with adequately. (Perhaps not from your personal perspective!!)
If my research notebooks actually ended up in the trash, the loss of productivity would have certainly not been cheaper compared to implementing a simple checkmark requiring the approval of the manager of the person whose desk was cleaned out.
Idea: Require every action taken by an SAP or similar system be tagged with the name and telephone number of the MBA who created the action in SAP.
Why has this company not made their loyal worker whole? He stayed there when they needed him even when their system was trying to lock him out.
They need to fix this. If they don't, they are not a company anyone should work for. Perhaps the worker did not want to risk making a big stink, but a manager should have taken the initiative. Humans were involved by the end and well aware of what was going on.
Now we're not just talking about a lost opportunity to reward a loyal worker. If you're right, somebody ought to be going to jail.
(1) "Small" in relation to the whole contract deal; what's one employee's salary in a million-dollar agreement between two corporations?
Real story from one of the (big) french telecom companies I worked for, as a contractor (a few years ago)...
In that company, a regular employee was given a full desk, contractors were only given 2/3 of a desk (meaning 2 desks put side by side for 3 persons).
Also, contractors were NOT allowed to go to ANY conference. Even when it was about technical stuff that was directly for their project. We had to rely 100% on a transmission of information by our managers/team leads. This led to humorous results, to say the least. Things like: a BIG meeting with plenty of people and managers, who then decided a HUGE technical change on the network, without the ONLY expert because he happened to be a contractor. Once given the results of the meeting, the guy was in a "WTF?" shock. He told me that be immediately binned the request: it basically asked him to disable the authentication server! Not the best decision for a BIG ISP, LOL. Seriously, that's almost beyond belief. (But I have other incredible stories similar to this one).
As a contractor, I have really been mistreated A LOT. So much so that I've sworn never to do it again.
If contractors are the only expert in a domain, there are big problems. Of course in corporations this is quite frequent - middle managers have yearly budgets for contractors, but aren't allowed to use that money to increase their headcount.
A company I work for decided to get a contractor in to run a £40m project. This makes sense for a management perspective, they get to blame the contractor (who's already left) if it fails, and they get to claim the glory if it works. It's terrible for a company though.
If I want 500 cables run in a data centre, or even 5 cables if it's a long way, I'll get a contractor in. Saves me a day by not having to do that work neatly and lets me do more important things (like ranting on HN). If I want someone to build me a fancy gui, I'll specify the frameworks, and let them mess around with the look and feel, but ultimately I own the output of the work, I need to be able to deal with it as if I wrote it myself.
>Some of that work included renewing my contract in the new system... When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me.
There are exceptions, but they are pretty rare in tech.
So the contract was negotiated at a specific price point for (say) three years but every X months the other party can opt out by not renewing. They only commit for a certain term.
As I interpreted the piece, it was a three year contract which was stored in an old system, and not transferred when that system was replaced. So the firing was triggered by the system no longer seeing any valid contract.
If that's true, it would be breach of contract. But if it was a rolling contract expected to end after three years, then yes, it would be a weird situation but not a breach.
From what I understand, you can only sue for $1000 or less in small claims court. An IT contractor who is making $1000 or less per week has bigger problems.
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/small-claims-suits-h...
Of course you'd shop around for the Bailiff company with the worse reputation and get them to send the lads who moonlight at that dodgy night club as Bouncers.
Ethical behaviour, from my perspective, would be to compensate the employee, regardsless of his legal rights. In a more worker-central system, the worker should have easy recourse to an official judgement for his money.
In the Netherlands there is even a concept of culpability in laws regarding firing. Mess up too much, and the employer will have to pay a premium on the disengagement fee. And while our economy is moving towards a lot more 'sole employee contractors' with less worker-rights, you still have rights and a way to affordably enforce them. For them (only) basic contract law holds. That would probably mean paying the full 3 years in this context. A contract _is_ a contract.
If it had renewal intervals, that means he wasn't legally entitled to 3 years.
This is likely why he wasn't paid for the interim either. The best the company could do would likely be to bump up the future rate or offer a "signing bonus".
Being a contractor is not at all like being an employee despite how similar the responsibilities are. You have to watch contract details like renewals like a hawk. This guy and his recruiter should have included compensation for failing to notify when not renewing.
The worker should not abandon the company during their time of need because of an unfortunate legal SNAFU. The company, in turn, should take it upon themselves to ensure that the worker doesn't suffer economically for having done the right thing by them.
Workers and management on a team ought to be able to trust each other to that degree, even if we understand that the interests of all parties are not fully aligned. That trust goes both ways.
Take that too far, tolerating abuse of trust, and you betray your obligation to yourself. But in small amounts, it's admirable.
Or, if you are saying that they shouldn't stay even for a day, even in the face of an emergency, then I disagree. Even if they don't have a legal obligation to do so, I respect those who would, like this worker. And I would prefer to work along such people as colleagues, trusting that if they could help it, they wouldn't leave their team in the lurch.
I don't like the idea that complete lack of trust and hairtrigger hostility should be the default mode of workforce participation.
As advice to a worker in this situation, it certainly makes sense to gut it out and take the risk of doing work without pay. It's, for most people, probably a much smaller risk than risking getting "really" fired without first having another job lined up.
Then complain to the employers, who are the ones who created that culture.
For what it's worth, I attribute the worst amoral behavior to corporate personhood rather than capitalism. Thus my preferred remedy is to eliminate corporate personhood, rather than capitalism.
I would agree with your point of professional contracting: contract for the worst and write out scenarios in contracts.
In this case though the employer acted in a way that signalled renewal and the contractor delivered in good faith. Back to contract law and ethics: are services delivered possibly without contract but in good faith without value and compensation?
If you keep showing up to work and your superiors keep managing you (and especially if you keep getting paid) the contract remains valid beyond its stated expiry date.
The Netherlands sounds a bit employer friendly in the UK mess up at all in firing some one you automatically lose even if the employee is as guilty as sin and was caught bang to rights
I billed 40 hours a week the entire time.
IMO because the generally demonstrated position of the labor force is that companies do not have to (which I hate, to be clear).
IMO, employees buy into the employer/owner-propogated myth that they are "lucky to be employed." As a result, employees greatly undervalue their labor and give up any leverage to make employers do the right thing.
Having been around the block a few times, I view 'work' as a transaction in which my employer and I need to realize fairly mutual benefits: most people don't. Employees generally see jobs and titles as a way to assess their societal value. And employers, knowing that, can do pretty much anything they want to people, dangling the occasional carrot to encourage higher worker output, but mostly working w/sticks.
This is also contributes to the zero real wage growth in a supposedly tight job market.
TLDR: power dynamics and poor 'game play' on the part of employees
Sounds very strange that he wouldn't care to do a bit of paperwork, which he from the sounds of it could probably well justify to do on company time, with the manager and director being supportive. Or get the agency to do it for him, and bill them for the trouble. Or whatever. Something smells a bit fishy about that part of the story.
And if there's anything in the comments about "the manager and director being supportive", I don't see it -- where did you get that?
As for "fishy", I find it very strange that someone writes an article emphasising twice that they're out three weeks of pay, but then couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. There's breach of contract, this isn't a long and arduous appeals process, it's open and shut, and if it isn't you have a lawyer deal with it, and recoup expenses, too. And if the guy just doesn't care about it, then why does he mention it twice?
And for the purposes of this, and the other sub-thread that is incredulous about this, this is not an American thing: If you're a contractor in Europe, and you don't get paid, and you then don't do anything about that, then you don't get paid. There's no process that automatically fixes things when the aggrieved party doesn't ask for them to be fixed (and yes, even in Europe, there's a bit of annoying process and paperwork to deal with).
Even if he's legally entitled to the money, bringing a lawyer into the mix is likely to sour his relationship with his client (he's a contractor), and—rightly or wrongly—could give him a bad reputation in the local community, making it harder to find work in the future.
I'd actually rather people sue over this to establish some kind of case law where companies' legal teams tell their management to make a default policy of giving the missed pay on demand. There might already be case law on it.
I suspect this is the difference. If this company is incapable of not firing someone, I imagine their appeals process could be equally miserable. Sure, maybe the manager and director want to repay him, but actually releasing funds to pay someone who "wasn't employed" is going involve a lengthy battle with some HR/Accounting computer system that just wants its invariants not to vary. Depending on somebody's financial position, I can see them deciding to just walk away on even a large chunk of money to avoid the mess.
But, of course, the author is perfectly within his rights to just not pursue this, and I have no idea what processes he'd been told to expect for this -- it's just strange that he would emphasise something he doesn't care about in the post.
This is a good point. I was thinking that no matter how trivial the money, actually dragging a check out of the accounting system would be a serious hurdle. But the solution I missed would be to sic legal on it - their machine tends to beat out everyone else's.
“Made available? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the appeals department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the forms, didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes I did. They were made available in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'”
This sort of thinking kind of makes sense in a world where almost every company is a big factory company with their workers primarily doing repetitive physical labor. And the business management world has not adapted at all to the transition to mental labor. Their businesses fail and suffer for this, but as it's a universal condition (yes even among Google and such... if the company has a physical office, then they haven't even done the obvious to benefit from the move to mental work) there's not much pressure motivating change.
-- Before the Law
A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that it is possible "but not now". The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man that he accepts them "so that you do not think you have failed to do anything." The man does not attempt to murder or hurt the doorkeeper to gain the law, but waits at the door until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years. The doorkeeper answers "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law
But it can also liberate us, and we should seek to maximize the liberating force of technology and try to disrupt the enslaving tendency.
If the author one day decides to just fuck off for 3 weeks with no advance notice, somehow I doubt the company would continue contracting with him.
HR let it sit on their desk and then forgot. My office manager is working at getting them to fix it ASAP. I've already missed one paycheck (which I will receive eventually).
First hint was a notice that I am going to be losing email access soon (which I still have currently). Then I lost keycard access to the building and office (it unlocks automatically at a set time, so I can still get in eventually). I've lost access to some of the resources we have (not critical to my job at this point). Got a letter in the mail about COBRA. Got a letter in the mail about retirement. I'm wondering when I will lose access to our wifi and cluster.
I renew every two weeks. You have to stay ahead of people, ideally lock in your renewal before the existing contract concludes.
When I returned, I got an email a few days later from a 3rd party survey company with the subject ”Exit Survey” which began “We’re sorry you’ll be leaving Yahoo soon.”
I was confused and so was my boss. Turns out some automated process included people who recently concluded a sabbatical in a mailing list for people who recently resigned...
In my case, there was a decision that employees like me would be paid out of the server budget. And then a subsequent decision came down: fire the employees that are getting paid out of the server budget! Of my department, regardless of how well we did our jobs, regardless of pay, regardless of length of employment, some of us had the 'paid like a server' checkbox checked and some of us didn't. The ones that didn't were kept on.
Worse, the first notification email happened while I was presenting to the CEO and the HR contact in the meeting had noticed half way through that I had been fired. Queue jokes of "was the presentation that bad?". No one was able to stop the machine because no one really knew all the different processes or they weren't built to stop midway.
This is (in my opinion) one of the reasons why everyone talking about getting rid of dedicated IT ops in their organizations is making a mistake. You can have devs building integrations and automation all day, but you still need sysadmins who can see the whole picture and override them when necessary. Having an outsourced (or even internal) hell desk that goes off a script doesn't take care of situations like this either.
Imagine if we didn't have an operations engineer who knew how to trace down the problem using a TCP dump. Or if it had been a developer who was, by the proper "DevOps" hygenics, denied access to the boxes to run TCP dumps.
Yeah, they're fixing it. No, we don't have a timeline.
I think wasn't auto fired like OP only because such trigger wasn't implemented in the company, yet. No IT support available can be really bad.
The percentage is debatable, but the more important issue is what that 1% looks like. Because it's definitely not 1% of their value, it's the high-stakes stuff that needs a context-aware human to apply a fix or good decision in place of whatever The Machine is trying to do.
(And if you're going to keep experts on full time to handle the occasional 1% case, there's no longer much reason to outsource everything else.)
maybe the engineer that designed the system got themselves fired while they were testing the system
Wow, talk about someone who really never learned the importance of thinking things through.
This comment chain on HN was the first thing I found when I googled "Job Inaction Timothy Zahn".
Looks like a good read though, might save it for lunch.
I'm really old.